Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/pantone-wants-15-month-for-the-privilege-of-using-its-colors-in-photoshop/

by kzemek • 4 years ago

142 130 4 years ago

api• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

There are actually two jewels of shitty capitalism in this crown of crappiness: subscription everything meets proprietary standards.

thejosh• 4 years 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.

whywhywhywhy2• 4 years 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.

iLoveOncall2• 4 years ago

So they’re just wanting a cut.

A cut that is actually larger than the price of Photoshop, which is $10 / month.

earthnail2• 4 years 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.

muro2• 4 years ago

The Pantone subscription is 1.5x as expensive as Photoshop.

newaccount74• 4 years 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.

stuart78• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

Alternative free palette: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387047

captainmuon• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

You can find knockoff of very good quality for a few bucks. I think they can control it better through Adobe licensing.

postpawl• 4 years ago

Linus tech tips did a video on this recently: https://youtu.be/JF8UziDHqZo

The one they got was more like $10k.

cthalupa2• 4 years ago

The most common are the Pantone formula guide or bridge books, and those are closer to $300

It's still quite a bit, but even the FHI chip books are under $1k. You have to be doing something a bit nuts like getting the full plastic chip carousels to get up into the thousands.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

Charging more for the dyes would impact the bottom line of very large business interests, namely, the chemical companies that make the inks, and the printing and publishing companies.

Forcing a contract graphic designer to pay $15/month for the privilege of being able to participate in designing stuff for print is much more palatable to business interests.

bearmode• 4 years ago

I used to work as a GD professionally, Pantones/spot colours are incredibly important in the industry. Process printing (usually CMYK) is great, but often just not accurate enough, and I really doubt Coca Cola or whoever else would be too pleased with you swapping out their pantone colour for an alternative.

sizzzzlerz• 4 years ago

Just think of the companies whose brand is represent by color. Coca Cola is certainly one but there's John Deere green, UPS brown, Caterpillar yellow, T-mobile pink, and Home Depot orange. I'm sure there are many international firms as well. Color is just as important to these companies as is their logo and they want to be damn sure it is represented accurately everywhere.

hdjjhhvvhga• 4 years ago

you'd loose the benefit of Pantone standardization

That's the point: these colors should be a standard. Standards can also be acquired for a fee. I also purchased physcial samples of Pantone colors. But paying an annual fee for the privilege of specifying a color in an app? No, thank you.

robertlagrant• 4 years ago

Colours can be a standard. Nothing's stopping anyone standardising what Pantone do.

AdamN• 4 years ago

Businesses want multiple revenue streams at different layers of the stack with different cycles. Charging developers, printers, consumable producers, hardware makers, etc... means Pantone can make money at every level and they can increase/decrease the price as those different layers as more or less spending capacity is available at that period in the cycle for that layer.

axiolite2• 4 years ago

Pantone can make money at every level

Yes, but there's something to be said of the "First one's free, kid" business model. Making it frictionless to get into your ecosystem usually results in many more sales in the end.

Fewer graphics designers using pantone colors means fewer products going out with pantone colors, which means fewer sales of pantone dyes.

amelius• 4 years ago

I think their businessmodel simply expired. They have to think of something new or end up like Kodak.

moolcool14• 4 years ago

Pantone is still a massively relevant company, and that has no signs of changing

bborud2• 4 years ago

Do you think their business model expired or do you think the products and services they provide are obsolete?

uri4• 4 years 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!

moolcool14• 4 years ago

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

redtails• 4 years ago

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

poulpy123• 4 years ago

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

dchia• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_dos17• 4 years 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.

iMerNibor2• 4 years ago

From what I recall, its about phyiscal to virtual color matching, so pantone offers samples of say plastic with the exact matching color as the virtual ones, so you can pick a color, tell the manufacturer you want the plastic molded that color and be pretty sure you'll get the right color of product (or if not you can go back to them and tell them to do it according to spec).

You'd also want to calibrate your monitor accordingly of course

iMerNibor2• 4 years ago

Of course at that point you're already bought into the ecosystem with physical samples (which are not cheap), monitor calibration and all, so it feels like a "double dip" for no value added

cthalupa2• 4 years ago

You'll never get exact matching colors between a digital representation and a physical sample - there are too many variables at play an distinct physical differences that can't be made up.

I have never found the Pantone hexs to be particularly close to even the basic coated/uncoated guide colors, either, despite having about as good of a color matching setup as one can get at the prosumer level (and do not see how going from the four-digit to five-digit range would close the gap in color accuracy on thee hexes)

As someone with 3 Pantone decks and 2 RAL decks within arm's reach while writing this, I've never understood the value proposition of these virtual libraries beyond a quick and dirty starting point for digital representation. When something goes to print, your printer isn't going to be comparing against what it looks like digitally, either. They'll either use their proprietary spot ink/dye mix/etc., or pull out their guide and compare physical to physical.

Every time I've sent stuff to a printer that has spot color in it, they've wanted it manually referenced as well, so I've never been able to just hand over an EPS or PDF that had spot color in it and get it done without additional work anyway.

TkTech• 4 years ago

My understanding is that the entire suite of colors is calibrated by material, among other things. #aabbcc on the screen does not look like #aabbcc when painted onto wood, or from plastic injection moulding. But Pantone Color #32 will be absolutely identical everywhere.

teddyh• 4 years ago

It’s worse than that. ‘#aabbcc’ does not exist outside of your screen. ‘#aabbcc’ is not a color. Colors are complicated: https://poynton.ca/ColorFAQ.html

bitwize• 4 years ago

PANTONE colors are specific mixes of pigments, not RGB or CMYK values. A PANTONE color includes elements like texture and lustre in its definition that cannot be captured in primary-color systems like RGB or CMYK. Certain trademark shades, like Tiffany blue, are captured as PANTONE colors as well. PANTONE is the standard for print graphic design because a designer will always know exactly how a PANTONE color will look on paper whereas significant calibration is necessary to get a consistent appearance from RGB or CMYK colors.

robinsonb5• 4 years ago

Yes indeed, the lustre makes a huge difference with some colours - sometimes even affecting the perceived hue, not just the vibrance - Pantone 136C vs 136U for example. Same ink, different paper.

chrisseaton3• 4 years ago

By 'hex code' do you mean RGB or CMYK?

Pantone encodes more colours than those two.

pxx3• 4 years ago

Your last sentence is just wrong. Pantone encodes thousands of colors. RGB/CMYK can encode references to as many (within-gamut, but you can also hack around this) colors as you want, typically millions, often billions.

Sure, you might not get Pantone 123 if somebody asks for #ffc72b. But if somebody says "use Pantone colors only" and specifies #ffc72b, you're going to get Pantone 123.

jansan• 4 years ago

It guarantees that the color will look on a product just like you selected it. In Germany we have an older system called RAL, which is sufficient for most use cases. For example if you ordered a window in RAL 7043 and need to repaint it, you can go to your next hardware store, oder some paint with that color code from any manufacturer, and colors will/should match. But the RAL system applies more or less only to the physical world.

thesuitonym• 4 years ago

It's very valuable if you're printing a single spot color on something. Instead of doing a cyan pass, a magenta pass, a yellow pass, and a black pass, you can just do a black pass and a pass of your spot color. Despite Pantone being a more expensive ink, you may end up spending less money because it allows you to simply use less ink, and fewer resources.

Not to mention when you supply a Pantone color, you will get exactly that color, no matter what print shop you go to (As long as they pay for Pantone inks).

brudgers4• 4 years ago

Pantone brings consistency. If you specify a Pantone color, pay a printer to use the right Pantone inks on the right media (and pay for the level of experience for the printer to do this right), you can get exactly what you expect.

By which I mean your company logo will by the right color (assuming your logo was specified as a Pantone color).

When printed, of course.

The hubub is because the Pantone color pallets have been a convenient way of picking colors for many use cases where consistency doesn't matter enough to pay for Pantone inks and the class of printer who can do them right...which is almost all use cases, everywhere all the time.

Pantone created the onscreen colors to facilitate soft proofing. In the small segment of users using them for that, the cost of a license is trivial because clients who require Pantone colors already expect to pay the costs associated with using them.

ksec• 4 years 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.

raxxorraxor2• 4 years ago

Seems like they dislike subscription models.

pessimizer3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Well, color me surprised!

raxxorraxor2• 4 years 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.

qwerty4561272• 4 years 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.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years 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.

qwerty4561272• 4 years 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?

WillAdams6• 4 years 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/.

moolcool14• 4 years 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.

brudgers4• 4 years ago

Pantone products are professional/B2B.

WillAdams6• 4 years 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.

rsynnott• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

noirscape4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

noirscape4• 4 years 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-crea...

bborud2• 4 years ago

I'm no fan of Adobe, but to me this sounds like a completely legitimate business decision.

Of course they are not going to pass on the savings to the user, except perhaps indirectly by having a way of easing the shareholder pressure to increase revenue per user, and thereby being able to push license price increases into the future. (I don't know this is how it would play out, but it is a possibility).

Removing something they are bundling from Pantone today also gives Pantone an incentive to build a direct relationship to the users, which may actually be an opportunity in disguise for Pantone. Or perhaps not: Pantone might find that they are worse off if the market turns out to be smaller in terms of profit potential.

(Disclosure: I don't use Pantone. However I do use color palettes from various manufacturers of paints. Very occasionally. And my requirements aren't really at the level where I need to use a calibrated toolchain. I make pictures, I spray paint, and if it roughly looks like what I saw on screen I'm happy.)

awkward• 4 years ago

It's bad communication as a media play. Adobe drops the licensing in the most expedient and user hostile way possible, and puts the blame on Pantone.

Long term, this might be a better model for Pantone - they're building a direct relationship with the print shops and other businesses that actually need this feature. Short term, a lot of users just treated this as an alternate color picker and Adobe is trying to manage who gets the flack.

HelloNurse2• 4 years 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?

noirscape4• 4 years 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.

moolcool14• 4 years 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.

matt3210• 4 years ago

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

pessimizer3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

gwbas1c• 4 years ago

I smell a lawsuit.

You can't copyright facts. From 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

cat_plus_plus• 4 years 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.

Adobe no longer licenses Pantone colors to be used freely Photoshop

Related Stories