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You’re Going To Have To Pay To Use Some Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now

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  • You’re Going To Have To Pay To Use Some Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now

    https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone...oud-1849714742

    It’s very likely you don’t give a great deal of thought to where the digital colors you use originally came from. Nor, probably, have you wondered who might “own” a particular color, when you picked it when creating something in Photoshop. But a lot of people are about to give this a huge amount of their attention, as their collection of PSD files gets filled with unwanted black, due to a licensing change between Adobe and Pantone.

    As of now, widely used Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will no longer support Pantone-owned colors for free, and those wishing for those colors to appear in their saved files will need to pay for a separate license. And this is real life.

    Pantone has been around since the 1950s, the New Jersey company originally refining printing inks, then later inventing the Pantone Color Matching System, used worldwide by designers to ensure a creation’s color will be exactly as desired, no matter where or how it’s manufactured. So, of course in becoming the industry-standard for color-matching, the company naturally asserts ownership of all its 2,161 hues, defending its intellectual property and preventing its unlicensed use. This extends as far as preventing others from creating “Pantone-compatible” color systems. Or, to put it another way, they claim to own colors.

    Last year’s announcement that Adobe would be removing the Pantone “color books” from its software brought consternation in the design world. One industry standard being removed from another was obviously going to create issues, but at the time Adobe said it would be “working on an alternative solution,” while rumors spread that the companies had had a falling out.

    Since then, the official reasons given haven’t made a great deal of sense. According to Pantone, the two companies started working together in the 1990s, but “since 2010, the Pantone color libraries within Adobe’s apps have not been updated.” This, apparently, means they’re “significantly out of date and missing hundreds of new Pantone Colors.” (Yes, the company seriously capitalizes “Color”.) This means that, “Pantone and Adobe have together decided to remove the outdated libraries and jointly focus on an improved in-app experience that better serves our users.”

    The removal of Pantone’s colors from Adobe’s software was meant to happen March 31 this year, but that date came and went. It was then due for August 16, then August 31. However, this month, people are noticing the effects, reporting issues with creations using Pantone’s spot colors. And the solution? It’s an Adobe plug-in to “minimize workflow disruption and to provide the updated libraries to the Adobe Creative Cloud users.” Which, of course, costs $15 a month. It’s Netflix, but for coloring in!

    However, Pantone still states in its out-of-date FAQ that, “This update will have minimal impact on a designer’s workflow. Existing Creative Cloud files and documents containing Pantone Color references will keep those color identities and information.” Yet today, people are reporting that their Photoshop is informing them, “This file has Pantone colors that have been removed and replaced with black due to changes in Pantone’s licensing with Adobe.”

    Others have reported that even attaching a Pantone license within Photoshop isn’t fixing the issue, colors still replaced by black, and workarounds sound like a pain.

    We’ve reached out to both Pantone and Adobe, and will update should either get back to us.

    We, as a species, are in a very interesting time when it comes to so-called “Intellectual Property.” As rules applying to physical objects were poorly imposed on digital items, usually controlled by those with the most money to spend and lose, we’ve seen this sort of nonsense spread from music to movies to digital art, and now the very colors they’re made from themselves. And it always seems to end in our having to pay even more money.

    It’s also just becoming more common to have to pay for aspects of services that used to be free. BMW charges some people for heated seats.

    There are workarounds to this specific issue, however. Not least freeing yourself from the misery of such closed software, where ridiculous situations are able to breed like rabbits. There’s Free Software like Gimp, and free, open color schemes like Open Color. Of course, there are always introduced difficulties when stepping away from industry standards, but then, if we all did it, those problems would go away pretty fast.

    If you need or want to stick to Adobe projects, then there are solutions there too. Free ones. Check out the video below for one.

    Graphic Design How To
    Another tip suggested by Print Week is to back up your Pantone libraries, then re-importing them when your Adobe software updates to remove them, or if it’s too late, finding a friend who already did. There’s a good chance this’ll work, given Pantone’s colors are stored as .ACB files, just as the rest of Photoshop’s colors.

    Or, you know, you could just copy the metadata values of the Pantone range.
    Personally I use Gimp and Scribus for my modest graphic needs, and don't have to worry about stuff magically disappearing from my programs and workflow.

  • #2
    Pantone colors are a thing, because you need some hard references of how a color looks like in real life, e.g. in print or when painted on a wall, etc. Pantone provides pretty expensive sample sets with swatches of the "real' color among the ingredients to mix the color.

    This fallout between Adobe and Pantone will make many people angry, no matter who started the fight. Many people are dependent on Pantone colors in their professional workflow and if they disappear from the base license, it may just be the reason to go looking for different tools alltogether...

    Comment


    • #3
      This situation between Pantone and Adobe is a bunch of bullshit.

      IMHO, this development is quite a bit worse than Dolby Digital encoding capability being removed from Premiere Pro and Audition a few years ago. The move affects all of Adobe's general purpose graphics applications, like Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop.

      Technically speaking, not everyone doing graphics work needs to apply spot colors to elements in a layout. It's supposed to be a print-related convention. For anyone not familiar with print production, a spot color like Pantone 485C Red, would have its own printing plate in addition to the four CMYK plates in "process" printing or a black "K" plate for a duo-tone print job.

      The problem is decades ago Pantone spot colors turned into the go-to color reference standard for company branding. Just about any corporate logo of significance has a brand guide which specifies Pantone spot colors for elements in the logo. Even if someone isn't outputting their graphics work in traditional print methods they're still expected to simulate the spot colors in a logo with reasonable accuracy. In my case, working in the sign industry, we have to simulate those spot colors with paint formulas for sign cabinets, sign faces and other parts or simulate the spot colors with our large format printers. Our latex-based printers have extra light cyan and light magenta ink colors in addition to the usual CMYK inks to extend the gamut range. Our RIP software (Onyx Thrive) will take note of Pantone colors applied to objects in the artwork and do its best to simulate the spot colors. Quite a few Pantone spot colors have color intensities that go past the limits of the CMYK gamut range. That's one reason why spot colors exist. They also have metallic spot colors and fluorescent spot colors. Obviously those cannot be simulated via conventional CMYK printing.

      Here's why I think this thing with Pantone is a bunch of bullshit. Adobe seems like a big bad monopoly, but I think Pantone is really the bad guy in this case. And they're making a really stupid mistake picking this fight with Adobe. We have to buy Pantone color books at least once every couple of years. Technically you're supposed to this every year because the colors can fade over time. But the color books are costly. Just one Color Formula Guide, containing two swatch books of Coated and Uncoated colors, costs almost $200. When some asshole wants to "borrow" one of my Pantone swatch books I shut that shit down immediately. They get surprised when I tell them how much those swatch books cost. Yeah, the damned things are staying in my desk drawer.

      Another trick Pantone uses to make people update their physical color swatch books: they add at least a couple dozen new colors every year. That article says Adobe hasn't updated its Pantone books since 2010. Bullshit. The Pantone color swatches in Adobe's software have been updated several times since then to include newer Pantone colors.

      We're already having to buy these physical swatch books for real-world reference to compare to print output. For over 30 years digital versions of Pantone's swatch books have been bundled into Adobe's software as well as software from rival companies, like CorelDRAW for instance. The digital swatches within the software kind of function as advertising to get users to buy the physical swatch books.

      I think Pantone is trying to strong-arm people into subscribing to their Pantone Connect service, which costs at least $60 per year. That's in addition to buying the damned color books for nearly $200 a pop. Not everyone is going to go for that. I think we'll see a good number of users stop specifying spot colors as a reference and just go with CMYK, RGB and L*a*b color values instead. Pantone is also not the only company that makes spot colors. There are other standards out there like Toyo and Trumatch. I still can't figure out for sure what extra value Pantone's Connect service provides that I don't already get with the digital swatches inside my regular graphics applications. It's like a solution in search of a problem -dreamed up by some fucking bean counter.

      There is strong potential this move by Pantone could back-fire. They could end up with far fewer people buying their over-priced color swatch books, much less subscribe to the freaking "Connect" service. BTW, is Pantone going to play the same hardball with Corel, Serif and other graphics software vendors?

      I'm also mad at Adobe, but over a different topic. For some reason I can only figure is just blatantly stupid, Adobe is going to remove support for Postscript Type 1 fonts from their applications starting in January of 2023. Adobe invented Postscript and that Type 1 font technology. I have a fairly serious collection of Type 1 fonts, some which came bundled in early versions of Adobe Illustrator and PageMaker. I'm not shit-canning those fonts. I'm probably going to be stuck having to buy some font conversion software to turn the Postscript fonts into OpenType versions.

      Regarding open source applications like Gimp and Scribus, those are fine for a one-man shop that isn't having to handle any external files. In my work place having multiple licenses of Adobe Creative Cloud is damned vital. There is no credible alternative. I get too damned many Illustrator files, PDFs output from Illustrator or InDesign or EPS files with Adobe-dependent features in them. I also use CorelDRAW and have copies of Affinity Designer, Vectornator and Inkscape. But I have to open Adobe-centric files in their native environments otherwise all sort of things literally break in the artwork. It actually costs less just to have the Adobe software versus wasting countless hours trying to make customer artwork import successfully into non-native software environments. I'd rather have the files open successfully and then be able to move on to the next task rather than killing many hours trying to repair artwork that was damaged upon import.​
      Last edited by Bobby Henderson; 10-30-2022, 12:51 AM.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
        Another trick Pantone uses to make people update their physical color swatch books: they add at least a couple dozen new colors every year. That article says Adobe hasn't updated its Pantone books since 2010. Bullshit. The Pantone color swatches in Adobe's software have been updated several times since then to include newer Pantone colors.
        As of late, they seem to be more busy with renaming colors to increase "political correctness", as you can't seemingly have any colors anymore with "nude" or "indian" in the name.

        Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
        I think Pantone is trying to strong-arm people into subscribing to their Pantone Connect service, which costs at least $60 per year.
        We were quoted about three times that, per seat per year...

        Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
        Pantone is also not the only company that makes spot colors. There are other standards out there like Toyo and Trumatch.
        The biggest problem are their spot colors outside of the CMYK gammut. Those ended up in some corporate identities, marketing campaigns and whatnot. Pantone is really often the only color system globally used...

        Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
        I still can't figure out for sure what extra value Pantone's Connect service provides that I don't already get with the digital swatches inside my regular graphics applications. It's like a solution in search of a problem -dreamed up by some fucking bean counter.
        Well, you get their fancy plugins with a build-in option to order a hard-copy!
        Ah, and you get all the latest colors and names... Totally worth the $180/month...

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
          As of late, they seem to be more busy with renaming colors to increase "political correctness", as you can't seemingly have any colors anymore with "nude" or "indian" in the name.
          I'm not aware of any Pantone color books that assign subjective names to colors. My swatch books contain colors labeled only with numbers. Maybe Pantone is playing around with color names in their advertising or something. I like the specific color numbers. That's because one person's idea of "Kelly Green" is a little different from that of another person. Pantone 349 Green is a very specific green. There's nothing subjective about that. No misunderstandings will occur. That's a big reason why Pantone's spot color system became such a common reference for colors in logo/branding purposes.

          Different color libraries, such as Sherwin Williams' paint color system, do include names along with specific numbers. We have a couple of those Sherwin Williams swatch books. The local paint store gave us those color books for free as a loss leader to sell more paint.

          Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
          We were quoted about three times that, per seat per year...
          I almost forgot how European customers get screwed a lot worse on software pricing than users in the US.

          Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
          The biggest problem are their spot colors outside of the CMYK gammut. Those ended up in some corporate identities, marketing campaigns and whatnot. Pantone is really often the only color system globally used...
          Pantone almost has a kind of monopoly on that. But this hard-ball move they're pulling with Adobe is really going to put the perceived value of those spot colors to a big test. Those spot colors are really important for various types of print-related design, product package design, retail point of purchase displays and even signs.

          But parts of the print graphics industry are in decline. Lots of newspapers and magazines have failed or turned into online-only publications. Lots of retailers have disappeared. A greater percentage of graphics work is being done solely for electronic screens (smart phones, tablets, notebooks/desktops, TV screens and even big LED displays). In a purely RGB-based viewing environment there really isn't any need for something like Pantone. A lot of people currently applying Pantone-based color fills to various elements in a graphics layout are going to discover they don't really need to do that anymore. I'm certain Pantone is going to see its user base decline quite a lot if they're going to try forcing Adobe software users to continually pay for those color palettes.

          Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
          Well, you get their fancy plugins with a build-in option to order a hard-copy!
          Ah, and you get all the latest colors and names... Totally worth the $180/month...
          I could order a Pantone Color Formula Guide just as fast from Amazon or another vendor just as fast as clicking a button in some plug-in. I'd probably be paying the same amount of money for the physical swatch books, if not more by buying them via a Pantone plugin. Pantone charges full MSRP (plus shipping) for their swatch books when ordering direct from them. I can get a significant discount from Amazon, plus free Prime shipping. Still, even if I'm blowing $160-$170 for those swatch books rather than $195 it's still quite a bit of money for two fan books of color chips.

          Pantone is also opening up a big can of worms in terms of file compatibility between users. How is an Adobe Illustrator AI file going to behave going from one PC where Pantone Connect is installed to another PC running Illustrator but without Pantone Connect? Are the color fills in that AI file going to break? Will the AI file fail to load at all? I'm waiting to see what kind of hell breaks loose. Adobe will probably catch some flak over it. But it could turn into a real public relations nightmare for Pantone.​

          Comment


          • #6
            Are the color fills in that AI file going to break?
            According to that article, the colours will turn into black.

            It's guaranteed to get your attention when you load the file, if nothing else.

            Comment


            • #7
              I've read up on the situation as media has spread a lot of confusion about what's going to happen, and apparantly, not ALL Pantone color books will be removed, from the now ten supported, the following three will remain:
              • Pantone+ CMYK Coated
              • Pantone+ CMYK Uncoated
              • Pantone+ Metallic Coated
              ​That will probably cover most usage cases, but will still make a lot of people pretty angry.​


              Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
              I'm not aware of any Pantone color books that assign subjective names to colors.
              The "basic" color books don't really contain any "subjective" names as far as I'm aware. There are some non-suggestive names though, like "Pantone Yellow", "Pantone Process Magenta".

              The fancy names are present in their Fashion, Interior and industrial design color books. Most if not all of the colors in those books have names. It looks like they've been busy eliminating everything that refers to a specific city name, race or anything that could somehow be seen as ever slightly offensive.

              Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
              I almost forgot how European customers get screwed a lot worse on software pricing than users in the US.
              It's not just software, it's hardware too, especially from premium brands like Apple, I guess that's at least part of the reason why iPhones are a lot less common around here than in the U.S. Right now, the Euro and Dollar are almost equal, so right now, the amount of "screwage" is a bit less than it used to be.

              Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
              Pantone almost has a kind of monopoly on that. But this hard-ball move they're pulling with Adobe is really going to put the perceived value of those spot colors to a big test. Those spot colors are really important for various types of print-related design, product package design, retail point of purchase displays and even signs.
              I hope that Pantone realises that a big chunk of threir current business may well be due to the fact of their long-time default presence in Adobe software. But, with big parts of the printing industry in decline, the market for expensive color guides is limited and nobody I know is replacing them every few years. So, that's why they also want to get into the subscription game, obviously.

              Those moves are dangerous though, I'm pretty sure that if Adobe wanted, they could steamroll over them by offering their own color library as integral part of their Creative Cloud. If they start offering color guides for less than Pantone, I'm sure you'll see the industry switching over time and burry Pantone in the process.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
                ​That will probably cover most usage cases, but will still make a lot of people pretty angry.​
                Removal of the spot color libraries is what's going to screw most users. I have no need for Pantone's process color books. The spot colors are what gets used for corporate branding purposes.

                I did make back-ups of the Pantone color books in Illustrator and Photoshop. If Adobe removes the spot color books that were originally installed I'm wondering if the software will automatically remove any copies of those color books if an end user pastes copies of the removed color books back into the relevant color book folders.

                Originally posted by Frank Cox
                According to that article, the colours will turn into black.
                If that's the case then I would expect a hell of a lot of users to immediately stop applying Pantone spot color fills to elements in their graphics layouts and revert to other models, such as RGB even though a lot of RGB-based colors will not print accurately. Specifying colors in L*a*b color space is another option, but that color model is a lot harder to use than CMYK or RGB.

                File portability -being able to exchange files with other users or send files to service bureaus for jobbing out specialty work, is a very important thing in graphics work flow. If I end up paying extra for the Pantone connect service just to apply spot color fills to artwork but those fills turn black at a company's computers where I need a billboard face printed then the Pantone thing will need to be absolutely amputated out of the workflow. Pantone will end up being a disease in need of being killed.

                Normally when I'm sending files created in Adobe's software to other companies I'll "flatten" or "expand" any live effects that depend on a certain plugin being installed, such as the huge collection of Astute Graphics plugins for Adobe Illustrator. Fill colors are a pretty basic thing that can't really be flattened or expanded to work on another computer if the color requires a certain plugin to be purchased and installed. That's a big problem.

                Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
                The "basic" color books don't really contain any "subjective" names as far as I'm aware. There are some non-suggestive names though, like "Pantone Yellow", "Pantone Process Magenta".
                There is a core set of basic Pantone inks that have subjective names -colors like Pantone Rhodamine Red or Pantone Reflex Blue. There are 18 basic ink colors. All of the Pantone spot color inks are created with mixing formulas derived from those 18 basic ink colors. Pantone also has separate ranges of pastel inks, fluorescent inks and metallic inks (most of those have their own color numbers).

                Originally posted by Marcel Birgelen
                Those moves are dangerous though, I'm pretty sure that if Adobe wanted, they could steamroll over them by offering their own color library as integral part of their Creative Cloud. If they start offering color guides for less than Pantone, I'm sure you'll see the industry switching over time and burry Pantone in the process.
                I've mentioned Adobe creating its own spot color library as a possible response to Pantone's hard-ball play in a couple of other graphics forums. I don't think Pantone would have a leg to stand on either if they wanted to complain Adobe was using monopolist tactics by doing such a thing. Adobe isn't the only company making graphics software. And Pantone isn't the only company making spot color libraries (even though Pantone is by far the most popular).

                Adobe would have some pretty damned powerful leverage if they did create their own spot color library. Adobe's software is extremely pervasive through the graphics industry. It is very difficult to do commercial work without it. The vast majority of newspapers and magazines are composed using Adobe InDesign. Most corporate branding work is done via Adobe Illustrator. The software is somewhat platform agnostic in that it works identically on Apple Macs and Windows-based PCs. Files trade back and forth pretty seamlessly. Hell, I bounce Illustrator files back and forth between my iPad and Alienware notebook. Adobe has a pretty large and pretty much "captive" user base. Pantone doesn't have the same kind of leverage. Their spot color libraries are pretty important for a lot of graphics work flow purposes. If Adobe provides an alternative a lot of Adobe software users might dump the Pantone stuff in favor of it.
                Last edited by Bobby Henderson; 10-31-2022, 09:41 AM.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Who needs fancy colors? I refuse to give into Adopie's monthly charge scam for their software. I'm still using the Photoshop CS-4 which I bought and paid for eons ago, and for the most part does everything I need.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Mark, you're in the same boat as Frank. You're not doing actual commercial graphics work like I'm doing, where I have to handle branding assets and other artwork elements from all kinds of other people. Those clients aren't going to give a damn if I have some ideological stance against Adobe Creative Cloud and want to get by using 14 year old software. They expect their assets to be reproduced properly. If I can't handle their materials in a professional manner they'll move on to another company who can.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Bobby Henderson View Post
                      Mark, you're in the same boat as Frank. You're not doing actual commercial graphics work like I'm doing, where I have to handle branding assets and other artwork elements from all kinds of other people. Those clients aren't going to give a damn if I have some ideological stance against Adobe Creative Cloud and want to get by using 14 year old software. They expect their assets to be reproduced properly. If I can't handle their materials in a professional manner they'll move on to another company who can.
                      No argument there Bobby!!! If I had big paying customers I'd have the full Adobe suite. Interestingly, My CS-4 still does updates....

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        What OS are you using to run CS4? Windows XP? I still have my own CS5.5 Master Collection box, but I don't think it would install on anything later than Windows 7. Another problem: Adobe has been turning off the activation servers for old versions of Creative Suite. They let me download an activation free version of CS2 Design Premium when they turned off the CS2 servers. I don't think they did the same thing when they turned off the CS3 activation servers. The activation servers for CS4 and later are still available to use (I think).

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          I'm using CS3 under Windows 11 (the activation free version, as you describe), and it appears to work fine. Ever since switching to Resolve for video editing and Diamond Cut for audio work, though, I don't use it very much.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            This is discussed in the NPR story at https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/11346...ft-in-the-dark . They mention a "Freetone" alternative.

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