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Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

142 points by kzemek 4y ago

api 4y ago
Photoshop is subscription too now right? So they’re just wanting a cut. It’s almost a funny way to indirectly protest the move to subscription everything.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Yeah, what a great protest. Everyone who is selling lifetime access for a fixed price should do a similar protest and move to subscriptions as well, that would really show them!
- praptak 4y ago
  There are actually two jewels of shitty capitalism in this crown of crappiness: subscription everything meets proprietary standards.
- thejosh 4y ago
  And they also have some of the absolute garbage software surrounding it. It's bananas for a company the size of Adobe to have such bad software.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    No one at the top cares about the creative tools part of the company whatsoever. They only bought Macromedia because Flash was the video player of the web. Think they all just care more about corporate PDF integrations than any of their creative tools. All the dev team talent left or was outsourced and the only changes that seem to be able to ship consistently is web view based welcome screens.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > So they’re just wanting a cut. A cut that is actually larger than the price of Photoshop, which is $10 / month.
  - earthnail 4y ago
    Yes, but Pantone colours is more specialised software and its price shouldn’t be compared to that of software for a wide audience. If you really need Pantone colours, it’s an expense easily worth it. I understand the outcry but TBH I think it’s a bit exaggerated. That being said I‘m also not sure whether it’s really worth it for Pantone to charge for their digital stuff. I can’t imagine it being a huge part of their revenue.
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      > Yes, but Pantone colours is more specialised software Pantone has nothing to do with software. The "software" here is a mapping of color names to hex. It's literally a text file.
      - earthnail 4y ago
        When you buy a coffee for $4, you also don't care that the beans in it cost $0.01. Cost of manufacturing and customer pricing are far more decoupled than most people think. Or, for a digital analogy, think of the good old discussion of the cost of distributing an mp3 vs the cost of creating the music (esp. back in the iTunes days when the mp3 cost $0.99). In this case, Pantone prices the verified digital access to their colours. Almost nobody needs that, UNLESS you deal with Pantone colours in the physical world - and there they have real value. I'm personally questioning the decision of making designers pay for the digital colours as well; I think it hurts adoption in the long run. But I also think the outcry is over the top: if you design products that require standardised colours in the manufacturing process, the cost of that tiny subscription is completely negligible. Also, because it's negligible, I can't imagine it being a huge part of Pantone's revenue, so this move might have done them more harm than good, but well... Either way, it seems to me that there's tons of people complaining about this price, but pretty much no-one ever really worked with Pantone colours. That's why I think the internet is overreacting.
- muro 4y ago
  The Pantone subscription is 1.5x as expensive as Photoshop.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure Pantone would have charged only a fraction of the cost if Adobe would have included a license for everyone. Since only a fraction of Photoshop users need Pantone, they now need to pay a lot more.
    - muro 4y ago
      I assume that's what was the case until now. Probably got too expensive to continue.
  - stuart78 4y ago
    I think those needing to subscribe to the new Pantone service are more likely to be paying for the full cc suite, not the single app model. This is quite a bit less than that per month.
progbits 4y ago
Discussed few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369951 Alternative free palette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047
captainmuon 4y ago
I wonder why they don't just charge more for the dyes (or the dye licenses, I think they are not making them themselves). I think it is bizarre that you should need a license to write down in a file "use this-and-that tube of color for printing this shape". If anything, they should be paying Adobe for including their colors. Maybe this is a possible evolution? Third party ink producers create photoshop add-ins allowing you to specify their specific products - not just standardized colors but actual bottles? I mean you'd loose the benefit of Pantone standardization. But anyway I use the colors brands that my trusted printshop uses. If they tell me ACME ink 1234 is the same as Pantone ABCD then I just would replace that in the document and be done. (Well to be honest for 99% of things I did spot colors (I think that's the term) are overkill anyway and my printshop guy just told me to use CYMK...)
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  They charge designers $X000 for a book or a set of paint chips with swatches of all the colors, so I assume they are trying to continue that revenue stream in a subscription-based way.
  - kuon 4y ago
    You can find knockoff of very good quality for a few bucks. I think they can control it better through Adobe licensing.
  - postpawl 4y ago
    Linus tech tips did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/JF8UziDHqZo https://youtu.be/JF8UziDHqZo The one they got was more like $10k.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      That channel sure loves to waste money for the sake of "OMG LOOK $$$ WE GOT IT". Just stick to the tech and stay in your lane. This isn't what we meant when we said 'more RGB stuff'.
uri4 4y ago
It only affects people who went online and into subscriptions. If you own local Photoshop instalation, you can still open PSD files with no troubles!
- moolcool 4y ago
  The last non-Creative Cloud photoshop release was almost a decade ago
redtails 4y ago
It's Adobe weaponizing its userbase against one of their business partners to force them to change their business tactics.
poulpy123 4y ago
Ironically it's Adobe that made mainstream the concept of subscription based graphic software
devd00d 4y ago
- sbuk 4y ago
  It’s normally a good idea to understand something you are criticising. Pantone do not ‘claim’ colours. They provide exact colour mixes for a variety of differing substrates and materials that guarantees exact replication. For that vast majority of brands, publishers and manufacturers, this is very important and worth paying for.
dchia 4y ago
Can someone tell me what value does Pantone bring to the table? As a man-on-the-street I fail to understand what they are claiming for. Is this about the naming Pantone has given to a particular Hex Code?
- gruez 4y ago
  It’s not just the rgb value. Using a specific Pantone color ensures that when you get it printed or manufactured it’s the color that you expect.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    ...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer (by specifying a Pantone color). What this $15 subscription is for is technically just that set of mappings built-in into Photoshop.
    - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
      It’s not really, you wouldn’t choose these colors from RGB/CMYK you’d use a sample book. It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team. $15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        > It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      And then you'd probably not get what you expect since your CMYK printer isn't calibrated like the print shop's printer is, despite having the same kind of paint.
ksec 4y ago
The title should really be Pantone wants $15/month for the privilege of using its colors in Creative Cloud or Photoshop Subscription. >To hear Pantone tell it, Adobe had not been updating the Pantone color libraries in its apps for more than a decade, which prompted the end of the previous licensing deal and the wholesale removal of the old libraries from Adobe's apps in favor of the Pantone Connect Extension. It sounds like Adobe doesn't want to pay X amount of money for it. And we now end up with the drama. But considering the cost of other Pantone tools, I am not surprised at the $15 mark.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Seems like they dislike subscription models.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  And whatever part of the Creative Cloud customers' money was previously being passed on to Pantone is now being pocketed by Adobe, and they're probably also grabbing a piece of that $15. Pantone is totally willing to be the PR bad guy here, nobody is moving from Pantone. It's an absurdly deeply entrenched and useful standard. The people that don't understand what's so special about Pantone are really irrelevant because they don't understand print and were never really customers. Of the people that do get it, I think 99.9% would prefer an open color standard (or openesque, because what Pantone does is not easy and has to generate income), but understand how insane a political/physical undertaking that would be to avoid paying $15 a month for products that they're already overpaying for. I'd rather ditch Adobe than ditch Pantone.
nelox 4y ago
Well, color me surprised!
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Only if you pay me $15 a month. Seriously I think the value they bring demands a price. Seeing how Adobe abuses its market dominance to force people into their cloud, I can understand their attempts to do the same.
qwerty456127 4y ago
Photoshop already is a rather expensive subscription so whoever doesn't mind paying Adobe obviously uses it for making good money on regular basis and shouldn't have a problem paying Pantone as well.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  "Has no choice but to pay for it" != "doesn't mind paying for it." Lots of graphic designers, "employed" as contractors, have to pay for photoshop. One of the reasons Adobe moved to this "cloud" shit is because lot of large companies tended to delay upgrading for quite some time...not because they couldn't afford it, but because most of their bargain-basement labor force couldn't.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    They should just introduce a more reasonable pricing policy offering personal licenses notably cheaper than corporate licenses, non-commercial and educational licenses even cheaper, major version upgrades at a fraction of a new purchase price. This would be a reasonable, practical, humane model, wouldn't it?
WillAdams 4y ago
Most folks who used PANTONE spot colours had no business doing so --- their gaudy layout w/ a dozen spot colours would never be printed w/ that many plates, and some production person always had to get permission to convert them into the process equivalents. For those few jobs where it is actually getting printed as a spot colour? The job would still print fine --- just send along a PANTONE colour chip, or ask your printer to provide one to verify colour usage. If you still want to use spot colours, use a free library such as the one developed by GCMI, then your printer can pull out the spot colour book and figure out which you actually want to print w/.
- moolcool 4y ago
  This is a real Steve Jobs "You're holding it wrong" way to look at this problem. This is an extremely anti-consumer move, and you can't blame the users for it.
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    Please tell me how one is going to meaningfully make use of a PANTONE colour w/o using a spot colour printing plate in an actual colour job --- oh? You mean use the process builds which are still in place and which folks can still use? I've always held that the spot colours should be an optional install, and only installable _after_ a user has passed a quiz on what spot colours and printing plates are.
    - moolcool 4y ago
      I am a normal pleb with a Photoshop license. I go to the paint store and see "Oh, I like this PANTONE 628 C colour. That might be nice to put on my wedding invitations", then go home and tell Photoshop "Hey, make the background Pantone 628 C". I am happy with how it looks, and save it. Then I go back a week later to print them, and suddenly it's all black. And that's okay somehow, because... I'm not using a spot colour printing plate?
      - WillAdams 4y ago
rsynnott 4y ago
Are we now at peak subscription nonsense? $20/month for Twitter, $15/month for Pantone, we may be hitting the point where people say enough is enough :) (Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)
- yreg 4y ago
  Both of those subscriptions seem like business expenses to me. As such they are not that non-sensical. I suppose only a very few people would need a verified Twitter or Pantone in CS without a connection to how they make their livelihood.
noirscape 4y ago
The title here is slightly misleading; Adobe refused to renew it's licensing deal with Pantone because the main way Adobes products are being used these days is digital art & design. There's no incentive for Adobe to keep paying licensing fees to Pantone (not to mention that the Adobe version of the plugin hasn't been updated since 2011 and is alledgedly very inaccurate and incomplete), so they're cutting the feature. Pantone, whose business is selling color matching inks between all sorts of materials (digital, paper, wood, fabrics you get the idea, this is a more expensive craft than one may think it is) is now selling the previous product they licensed out to Adobe as a separate 15$/month plugin. The fees specifically exist to make sure that the colors on screen do actually match the colors of the ink that Pantone provides to printing companies. That's why it costs money - Pantone is constantly adding, changing and tweaking those inks to make sure they're as uniform as possible and digital is just another target they have to provide a matching color for. The only real problem I see here is that Adobe didn't account for the fact that a lot of people likely used it as a hue selector in Photoshop and that they didn't provide an easy one-time Pantone Spot Color to RGB conversion and instead just blacked out the colors.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  I think the main problem is how Adobe worded the change. They could have written "We didn't renew our license with Pantone because it was eating into our profits, so you are on your own now. We also changed said colors to black, to make it easier to spot what you are missing. Have a nice day". Instead they've written some corporate speak, and let the thing roll by itself.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Oh absolutely, the wording Adobe used is abysmal in telling you exactly why they did it, but arguably that is the point. Nobody wants to hear "yeah so we're killing the feature you're using because it's not profitable enough for us anymore", speaking from experience of this happening with certain FOSS projects (where profit is substituted with "Gary wrote this 5 years ago and we haven't seen him in 3 years so I'm going to yoink it before it starts causing bugs since I dont want to spend time maintaining Gary's code"). That's not an indictment of FOSS projects to be clear (free gift horse and all that), but it does show insight in how feature cuts will come across when done for those sorts of reasons. The other problem is that sites like Kotaku[1] decided to run the story in a decisively false manner by suggesting that Pantone is trying to copyright the color spectrum. The ARSTechnica article is a slightly more nuanced take on that Kotaku article which was blatantly bad faith, but still overwhelmingly missing the point. [1]: https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone-color-plugin-adobe-creative-cloud-1849714742 https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone-color-plugin-adobe-crea...
HelloNurse 4y ago
Deliberately corrupting (or pretending to corrupt) the user's files is a whole new level of Adobeness. Are they trying to shame Pantone, as some optimistic comments suggest, or happy to get a valued partner's help in their mission to evolve subscriptions to be more like ransomware?
- noirscape 4y ago
  There's no file corruption, Adobe simply updated it's UI to not provide a rendering color to Pantones colors anymore so they default to black. If you were to have another program that can open PSDs and provide rendering colors for Pantones colors, it'd work just fine. They're cutting a feature (one Adobe had been neglecting for over a decade), not corrupting any files. For the people who weren't supposed to be using Pantone to begin with (digital only artists), yeah it's annoying. For those people a simple conversion of Pantone to RGB in their files should be enough though and older versions of Photoshop can do that if I understand it correctly (hence why Adobe is recommending older versions of Photoshop for people affected by this). Everyone else seems to not have been supposed to use the Adobe functionality anyway because it's extremely outdated.
  - moolcool 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is a very obtuse way to look at this problem. "Oh, the data is still there. You just don't have any way to read it". Like that's fantastic if you're a massive pedant, but if you actually want to use your files using with tools you used to create them, it's functionally identical to the file being corrupted. Doubly so if the application is some cloud bullshit that you can't keep old/functional versions of, despite paying out the nose for it. And the justification is just that the user wasn't supposed to use that feature in the first place? You have to be so gaslit by Adobe and dark patterns writ large to think this okay.
    - noirscape 4y ago
      Data corruption usually refers to actual data loss. The "data is still there but you just can't view it" isn't corruption, it just means your tools aren't up to the task. You can still download older versions of Adobes apps, it's right there in the ARS article even (Creative Cloud lets you download older versions of PS, InDesign and the like), so your second argument about cloud bullshit doesn't go up there either. As for the "not supposed to use" part; digital artists were never meant to use Pantone Spot colors to begin with. They're very specifically intended for graphic designers who are planning to have their works printed on different designs. That is what their colors are for. I don't think Adobe handled (or communicated) this well at all, but this is de facto not data corruption.
matt3210 4y ago
You mean using its color Names. They don’t own the hex values
- pessimizer 4y ago
  There are any number of ways to turn Pantone names into hex values. The names are what's important, because they are placeholders for specific formulations of ink.
H1Supreme 4y ago
I think Pantone is overplaying their hand here. Clearly, their business has been dwindling for years. I started my professional career in graphic design 20 years ago. Design work targeting digital was barely a blip on the radar. It was all print. Interviews for jobs required a physical portfolio. These days, print is the odd man out. So, the almighty Pantone swatch book has less value than it once did. Especially, if they want to hose users for $15 a month to use the swatches. Does that mean everyone gets a swatch book for free? Which, btw, is all that matters. The digital swatches really don't mean shit. It's just a placeholder color separation that means "insert spot color here". Fwiw, in all my years of print design, I used the Pantone swatch book less than a handful of times. It was 99.9% CMYK (which I also had a swatch book for). Maybe it was just the industry/clients I worked with. But, spot colors could add significant cost to a project. So, it was rarely opted.
beastman82 4y ago
It's a free market, they can charge whatever they please. You are free to decline the offer.
gwbas1c 4y ago
I smell a lawsuit. You can't copyright facts. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... > Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.[1] In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.
- LelouBil 4y ago
  From what I understand, no "fact" is being copyrighted here. What is copyrighted is a set of names for colors, that Pantone came up with, which they can have "standardized" for each material they sell ink for.
counttheforks 4y ago
Anyone have a list of the hex colors? Should be added to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Serves people right for trusting their own work to subscription software with no guaranteed long term support. Adobe could also just go under one day and then say goodbye to a decade of your photo edits. Charging for color adjustment in print is perfectly reasonable, just to decode RGB values is some bull.

142 points by kzemek 4y ago

api 4y ago

Photoshop is subscription too now right? So they’re just wanting a cut. It’s almost a funny way to indirectly protest the move to subscription everything.

capableweb 4y ago
Yeah, what a great protest. Everyone who is selling lifetime access for a fixed price should do a similar protest and move to subscriptions as well, that would really show them!
praptak 4y ago
There are actually two jewels of shitty capitalism in this crown of crappiness: subscription everything meets proprietary standards.
thejosh 4y ago
And they also have some of the absolute garbage software surrounding it. It's bananas for a company the size of Adobe to have such bad software.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  No one at the top cares about the creative tools part of the company whatsoever. They only bought Macromedia because Flash was the video player of the web. Think they all just care more about corporate PDF integrations than any of their creative tools. All the dev team talent left or was outsourced and the only changes that seem to be able to ship consistently is web view based welcome screens.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> So they’re just wanting a cut. A cut that is actually larger than the price of Photoshop, which is $10 / month.
- earthnail 4y ago
  Yes, but Pantone colours is more specialised software and its price shouldn’t be compared to that of software for a wide audience. If you really need Pantone colours, it’s an expense easily worth it. I understand the outcry but TBH I think it’s a bit exaggerated. That being said I‘m also not sure whether it’s really worth it for Pantone to charge for their digital stuff. I can’t imagine it being a huge part of their revenue.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > Yes, but Pantone colours is more specialised software Pantone has nothing to do with software. The "software" here is a mapping of color names to hex. It's literally a text file.
    - earthnail 4y ago
      When you buy a coffee for $4, you also don't care that the beans in it cost $0.01. Cost of manufacturing and customer pricing are far more decoupled than most people think. Or, for a digital analogy, think of the good old discussion of the cost of distributing an mp3 vs the cost of creating the music (esp. back in the iTunes days when the mp3 cost $0.99). In this case, Pantone prices the verified digital access to their colours. Almost nobody needs that, UNLESS you deal with Pantone colours in the physical world - and there they have real value. I'm personally questioning the decision of making designers pay for the digital colours as well; I think it hurts adoption in the long run. But I also think the outcry is over the top: if you design products that require standardised colours in the manufacturing process, the cost of that tiny subscription is completely negligible. Also, because it's negligible, I can't imagine it being a huge part of Pantone's revenue, so this move might have done them more harm than good, but well... Either way, it seems to me that there's tons of people complaining about this price, but pretty much no-one ever really worked with Pantone colours. That's why I think the internet is overreacting.
muro 4y ago
The Pantone subscription is 1.5x as expensive as Photoshop.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure Pantone would have charged only a fraction of the cost if Adobe would have included a license for everyone. Since only a fraction of Photoshop users need Pantone, they now need to pay a lot more.
  - muro 4y ago
    I assume that's what was the case until now. Probably got too expensive to continue.
- stuart78 4y ago
  I think those needing to subscribe to the new Pantone service are more likely to be paying for the full cc suite, not the single app model. This is quite a bit less than that per month.

progbits 4y ago

Discussed few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369951 Alternative free palette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047

captainmuon 4y ago

I wonder why they don't just charge more for the dyes (or the dye licenses, I think they are not making them themselves). I think it is bizarre that you should need a license to write down in a file "use this-and-that tube of color for printing this shape". If anything, they should be paying Adobe for including their colors. Maybe this is a possible evolution? Third party ink producers create photoshop add-ins allowing you to specify their specific products - not just standardized colors but actual bottles? I mean you'd loose the benefit of Pantone standardization. But anyway I use the colors brands that my trusted printshop uses. If they tell me ACME ink 1234 is the same as Pantone ABCD then I just would replace that in the document and be done. (Well to be honest for 99% of things I did spot colors (I think that's the term) are overkill anyway and my printshop guy just told me to use CYMK...)

pclmulqdq 4y ago
They charge designers $X000 for a book or a set of paint chips with swatches of all the colors, so I assume they are trying to continue that revenue stream in a subscription-based way.
- kuon 4y ago
  You can find knockoff of very good quality for a few bucks. I think they can control it better through Adobe licensing.
- postpawl 4y ago
  Linus tech tips did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/JF8UziDHqZo https://youtu.be/JF8UziDHqZo The one they got was more like $10k.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    That channel sure loves to waste money for the sake of "OMG LOOK $$$ WE GOT IT". Just stick to the tech and stay in your lane. This isn't what we meant when we said 'more RGB stuff'.

uri4 4y ago

It only affects people who went online and into subscriptions. If you own local Photoshop instalation, you can still open PSD files with no troubles!

moolcool 4y ago
The last non-Creative Cloud photoshop release was almost a decade ago

redtails 4y ago

It's Adobe weaponizing its userbase against one of their business partners to force them to change their business tactics.

poulpy123 4y ago

Ironically it's Adobe that made mainstream the concept of subscription based graphic software

devd00d 4y ago

sbuk 4y ago
It’s normally a good idea to understand something you are criticising. Pantone do not ‘claim’ colours. They provide exact colour mixes for a variety of differing substrates and materials that guarantees exact replication. For that vast majority of brands, publishers and manufacturers, this is very important and worth paying for.

dchia 4y ago

Can someone tell me what value does Pantone bring to the table? As a man-on-the-street I fail to understand what they are claiming for. Is this about the naming Pantone has given to a particular Hex Code?

gruez 4y ago
It’s not just the rgb value. Using a specific Pantone color ensures that when you get it printed or manufactured it’s the color that you expect.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  ...which is also what you get by using an RGB / CMYK approximation and then telling the manufacturer which kind of paint should be used for that layer (by specifying a Pantone color). What this $15 subscription is for is technically just that set of mappings built-in into Photoshop.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    It’s not really, you wouldn’t choose these colors from RGB/CMYK you’d use a sample book. It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team. $15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      > It’s more the tool within PS to tell the printers easily which pantones you want to use. That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    And then you'd probably not get what you expect since your CMYK printer isn't calibrated like the print shop's printer is, despite having the same kind of paint.

ksec 4y ago

The title should really be Pantone wants $15/month for the privilege of using its colors in Creative Cloud or Photoshop Subscription. >To hear Pantone tell it, Adobe had not been updating the Pantone color libraries in its apps for more than a decade, which prompted the end of the previous licensing deal and the wholesale removal of the old libraries from Adobe's apps in favor of the Pantone Connect Extension. It sounds like Adobe doesn't want to pay X amount of money for it. And we now end up with the drama. But considering the cost of other Pantone tools, I am not surprised at the $15 mark.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
Seems like they dislike subscription models.
pessimizer 4y ago
And whatever part of the Creative Cloud customers' money was previously being passed on to Pantone is now being pocketed by Adobe, and they're probably also grabbing a piece of that $15. Pantone is totally willing to be the PR bad guy here, nobody is moving from Pantone. It's an absurdly deeply entrenched and useful standard. The people that don't understand what's so special about Pantone are really irrelevant because they don't understand print and were never really customers. Of the people that do get it, I think 99.9% would prefer an open color standard (or openesque, because what Pantone does is not easy and has to generate income), but understand how insane a political/physical undertaking that would be to avoid paying $15 a month for products that they're already overpaying for. I'd rather ditch Adobe than ditch Pantone.

nelox 4y ago

Well, color me surprised!

raxxorraxor 4y ago
Only if you pay me $15 a month. Seriously I think the value they bring demands a price. Seeing how Adobe abuses its market dominance to force people into their cloud, I can understand their attempts to do the same.

qwerty456127 4y ago

Photoshop already is a rather expensive subscription so whoever doesn't mind paying Adobe obviously uses it for making good money on regular basis and shouldn't have a problem paying Pantone as well.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
"Has no choice but to pay for it" != "doesn't mind paying for it." Lots of graphic designers, "employed" as contractors, have to pay for photoshop. One of the reasons Adobe moved to this "cloud" shit is because lot of large companies tended to delay upgrading for quite some time...not because they couldn't afford it, but because most of their bargain-basement labor force couldn't.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  They should just introduce a more reasonable pricing policy offering personal licenses notably cheaper than corporate licenses, non-commercial and educational licenses even cheaper, major version upgrades at a fraction of a new purchase price. This would be a reasonable, practical, humane model, wouldn't it?

WillAdams 4y ago

Most folks who used PANTONE spot colours had no business doing so --- their gaudy layout w/ a dozen spot colours would never be printed w/ that many plates, and some production person always had to get permission to convert them into the process equivalents. For those few jobs where it is actually getting printed as a spot colour? The job would still print fine --- just send along a PANTONE colour chip, or ask your printer to provide one to verify colour usage. If you still want to use spot colours, use a free library such as the one developed by GCMI, then your printer can pull out the spot colour book and figure out which you actually want to print w/.

moolcool 4y ago
This is a real Steve Jobs "You're holding it wrong" way to look at this problem. This is an extremely anti-consumer move, and you can't blame the users for it.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  Please tell me how one is going to meaningfully make use of a PANTONE colour w/o using a spot colour printing plate in an actual colour job --- oh? You mean use the process builds which are still in place and which folks can still use? I've always held that the spot colours should be an optional install, and only installable _after_ a user has passed a quiz on what spot colours and printing plates are.
  - moolcool 4y ago
    I am a normal pleb with a Photoshop license. I go to the paint store and see "Oh, I like this PANTONE 628 C colour. That might be nice to put on my wedding invitations", then go home and tell Photoshop "Hey, make the background Pantone 628 C". I am happy with how it looks, and save it. Then I go back a week later to print them, and suddenly it's all black. And that's okay somehow, because... I'm not using a spot colour printing plate?
    - WillAdams 4y ago

rsynnott 4y ago

Are we now at peak subscription nonsense? $20/month for Twitter, $15/month for Pantone, we may be hitting the point where people say enough is enough :) (Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)

yreg 4y ago
Both of those subscriptions seem like business expenses to me. As such they are not that non-sensical. I suppose only a very few people would need a verified Twitter or Pantone in CS without a connection to how they make their livelihood.

noirscape 4y ago

The title here is slightly misleading; Adobe refused to renew it's licensing deal with Pantone because the main way Adobes products are being used these days is digital art & design. There's no incentive for Adobe to keep paying licensing fees to Pantone (not to mention that the Adobe version of the plugin hasn't been updated since 2011 and is alledgedly very inaccurate and incomplete), so they're cutting the feature. Pantone, whose business is selling color matching inks between all sorts of materials (digital, paper, wood, fabrics you get the idea, this is a more expensive craft than one may think it is) is now selling the previous product they licensed out to Adobe as a separate 15$/month plugin. The fees specifically exist to make sure that the colors on screen do actually match the colors of the ink that Pantone provides to printing companies. That's why it costs money - Pantone is constantly adding, changing and tweaking those inks to make sure they're as uniform as possible and digital is just another target they have to provide a matching color for. The only real problem I see here is that Adobe didn't account for the fact that a lot of people likely used it as a hue selector in Photoshop and that they didn't provide an easy one-time Pantone Spot Color to RGB conversion and instead just blacked out the colors.

bayindirh 4y ago
I think the main problem is how Adobe worded the change. They could have written "We didn't renew our license with Pantone because it was eating into our profits, so you are on your own now. We also changed said colors to black, to make it easier to spot what you are missing. Have a nice day". Instead they've written some corporate speak, and let the thing roll by itself.
- noirscape 4y ago
  Oh absolutely, the wording Adobe used is abysmal in telling you exactly why they did it, but arguably that is the point. Nobody wants to hear "yeah so we're killing the feature you're using because it's not profitable enough for us anymore", speaking from experience of this happening with certain FOSS projects (where profit is substituted with "Gary wrote this 5 years ago and we haven't seen him in 3 years so I'm going to yoink it before it starts causing bugs since I dont want to spend time maintaining Gary's code"). That's not an indictment of FOSS projects to be clear (free gift horse and all that), but it does show insight in how feature cuts will come across when done for those sorts of reasons. The other problem is that sites like Kotaku[1] decided to run the story in a decisively false manner by suggesting that Pantone is trying to copyright the color spectrum. The ARSTechnica article is a slightly more nuanced take on that Kotaku article which was blatantly bad faith, but still overwhelmingly missing the point. [1]: https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone-color-plugin-adobe-creative-cloud-1849714742 https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone-color-plugin-adobe-crea...

HelloNurse 4y ago

Deliberately corrupting (or pretending to corrupt) the user's files is a whole new level of Adobeness. Are they trying to shame Pantone, as some optimistic comments suggest, or happy to get a valued partner's help in their mission to evolve subscriptions to be more like ransomware?

noirscape 4y ago
There's no file corruption, Adobe simply updated it's UI to not provide a rendering color to Pantones colors anymore so they default to black. If you were to have another program that can open PSDs and provide rendering colors for Pantones colors, it'd work just fine. They're cutting a feature (one Adobe had been neglecting for over a decade), not corrupting any files. For the people who weren't supposed to be using Pantone to begin with (digital only artists), yeah it's annoying. For those people a simple conversion of Pantone to RGB in their files should be enough though and older versions of Photoshop can do that if I understand it correctly (hence why Adobe is recommending older versions of Photoshop for people affected by this). Everyone else seems to not have been supposed to use the Adobe functionality anyway because it's extremely outdated.
- moolcool 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is a very obtuse way to look at this problem. "Oh, the data is still there. You just don't have any way to read it". Like that's fantastic if you're a massive pedant, but if you actually want to use your files using with tools you used to create them, it's functionally identical to the file being corrupted. Doubly so if the application is some cloud bullshit that you can't keep old/functional versions of, despite paying out the nose for it. And the justification is just that the user wasn't supposed to use that feature in the first place? You have to be so gaslit by Adobe and dark patterns writ large to think this okay.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Data corruption usually refers to actual data loss. The "data is still there but you just can't view it" isn't corruption, it just means your tools aren't up to the task. You can still download older versions of Adobes apps, it's right there in the ARS article even (Creative Cloud lets you download older versions of PS, InDesign and the like), so your second argument about cloud bullshit doesn't go up there either. As for the "not supposed to use" part; digital artists were never meant to use Pantone Spot colors to begin with. They're very specifically intended for graphic designers who are planning to have their works printed on different designs. That is what their colors are for. I don't think Adobe handled (or communicated) this well at all, but this is de facto not data corruption.

matt3210 4y ago

You mean using its color Names. They don’t own the hex values

pessimizer 4y ago
There are any number of ways to turn Pantone names into hex values. The names are what's important, because they are placeholders for specific formulations of ink.

H1Supreme 4y ago

I think Pantone is overplaying their hand here. Clearly, their business has been dwindling for years. I started my professional career in graphic design 20 years ago. Design work targeting digital was barely a blip on the radar. It was all print. Interviews for jobs required a physical portfolio. These days, print is the odd man out. So, the almighty Pantone swatch book has less value than it once did. Especially, if they want to hose users for $15 a month to use the swatches. Does that mean everyone gets a swatch book for free? Which, btw, is all that matters. The digital swatches really don't mean shit. It's just a placeholder color separation that means "insert spot color here". Fwiw, in all my years of print design, I used the Pantone swatch book less than a handful of times. It was 99.9% CMYK (which I also had a swatch book for). Maybe it was just the industry/clients I worked with. But, spot colors could add significant cost to a project. So, it was rarely opted.

beastman82 4y ago

It's a free market, they can charge whatever they please. You are free to decline the offer.

gwbas1c 4y ago

I smell a lawsuit. You can't copyright facts. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... > Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright.[1] In the case appealed, Feist had copied information from Rural's telephone listings to include in its own, after Rural had refused to license the information. Rural sued for copyright infringement. The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.

LelouBil 4y ago
From what I understand, no "fact" is being copyrighted here. What is copyrighted is a set of names for colors, that Pantone came up with, which they can have "standardized" for each material they sell ink for.

counttheforks 4y ago

Anyone have a list of the hex colors? Should be added to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Serves people right for trusting their own work to subscription software with no guaranteed long term support. Adobe could also just go under one day and then say goodbye to a decade of your photo edits. Charging for color adjustment in print is perfectly reasonable, just to decode RGB values is some bull.