Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

Discussed few days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33369951" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33369951</a><p>Alternative free palette: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33387047" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33387047</a>

I wonder why they don&#x27;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 &quot;use this-and-that tube of color for printing this shape&quot;. If anything, they should be paying Adobe for including their colors.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>(Well to be honest for 99% of things I did spot colors (I think that&#x27;s the term) are overkill anyway and my printshop guy just told me to use CYMK...)

Most folks who used PANTONE spot colours had no business doing so --- their gaudy layout w&#x2F; a dozen spot colours would never be printed w&#x2F; that many plates, and some production person always had to get permission to convert them into the process equivalents.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;.

Deliberately corrupting (or pretending to corrupt) the user&#x27;s files is a whole new level of Adobeness.<p>Are they trying to shame Pantone, as some optimistic comments suggest, or happy to get a valued partner&#x27;s help in their mission to evolve subscriptions to be more like ransomware?

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.<p>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&#x27;t mean shit. It&#x27;s just a placeholder color separation that means &quot;insert spot color here&quot;.<p>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&#x2F;clients I worked with. But, spot colors could add significant cost to a project. So, it was rarely opted.

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?

The title should really be Pantone wants $15&#x2F;month for the privilege of using its colors in <i>Creative Cloud</i> or Photoshop Subscription.<p>&gt;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&#x27;s apps in favor of the Pantone Connect Extension.<p>It sounds like Adobe doesn&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s Adobe weaponizing its userbase against one of their business partners to force them to change their business tactics.

Ironically it&#x27;s Adobe that made mainstream the concept of subscription based graphic software

Photoshop already is a rather expensive subscription so whoever doesn&#x27;t mind paying Adobe obviously uses it for making good money on regular basis and shouldn&#x27;t have a problem paying Pantone as well.

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.

Are we now at peak subscription nonsense? $20&#x2F;month for Twitter, $15&#x2F;month for Pantone, we may be hitting the point where people say enough is enough :)<p>(Tbh I suspect the Pantone thing is more likely to fly than the Twitter thing)

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.

Anyone have a list of the hex colors? Should be added to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Illegal_number" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Illegal_number</a>

Well, color me surprised!

The title here is slightly misleading; Adobe refused to renew it&#x27;s licensing deal with Pantone because the main way Adobes products are being used these days is digital art &amp; design. There&#x27;s no incentive for Adobe to keep paying licensing fees to Pantone (not to mention that the Adobe version of the plugin hasn&#x27;t been updated since 2011 and is alledgedly very inaccurate and incomplete), so they&#x27;re cutting the feature.<p>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$&#x2F;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&#x27;s why it costs money - Pantone is constantly adding, changing and tweaking those inks to make sure they&#x27;re as uniform as possible and digital is just another target they have to provide a matching color for.<p>The only real problem I see here is that Adobe didn&#x27;t account for the fact that a lot of people likely used it as a hue selector in Photoshop and that they didn&#x27;t provide an easy one-time Pantone Spot Color to RGB conversion and instead just blacked out the colors.

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!

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

It&#x27;s a free market, they can charge whatever they please. You are free to decline the offer.

I smell a lawsuit.<p>You can&#x27;t copyright facts. From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...</a>.<p>&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s phone directory was not copyrightable and that therefore no infringement existed.