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Adobe - Changes coming to the Pantone Color Libraries

dypinc

dypinc

New Member
C

ColorCrest

All around shop helper.
I thought I had already made mention of the Adobe pending changes as part of a reply in another thread a few days ago. It seems Pantone is the culprit this time. Pantone color values at their website have been behind a paywall for some time.
 
dypinc

dypinc

New Member
What ever color values you assign to a spot color and have a library for is pretty meaningless without a reference (book)? Yes one can make their own library and create a color chart from it and send that to a client to pick out the color he wants but a Joe Smoe from Idaho color library with hot pink 2 in a print job who would know what that really should look like. So is Adobe going to start printing reference books for their alternative solution?
 
dypinc

dypinc

New Member
CanuckSigns said:
Yes, but they are printed with vanishing ink, every month you need to plug your swatch book into your PC to connect to the cloud to verify you have paid your subscription, if not the fan deck goes blank except for **** you in big red letters on the front.
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Don't give them any ideas. Oh wait, they probably thought of this already.
 
Notarealsignguy

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
Sorry if this sounds dumb but were spot colors ever even intended for CMYK printing? Shouldn't you be able to profile your printer with other known values? I thought spots were more for offset and screen printing where you use a spot color ink rather than a blend? A lot of branding guidelines specify RGB, CMYK and Pantones for the same color so it is feasible that people would move away from Pantone if they had to pay for it.
 
B

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Yep. We have a couple Sherwin Williams books and some from other paint vendors as well. But the physical Pantone swatch books cost quite a bit, like around $200 for a pair of coated and uncoated spot color books. They're technically supposed to be replaced every year. But at that price it's just best to take care of them and keep them out of the light when not in use. We have them on hand for customers to use in comparing the chips to stock vinyl colors, paint chips from other color systems. And they're handy for us to see how close our printers are mimicking a spot color value.

JBurton said:
Any word if corel is going to keep these in on their own dime or start a secondary subscription as well?
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There's no telling. I don't know what Adobe, Corel and others have been paying to include electronic versions of Pantone swatch libraries in their applications. Or if they've had to pay anything at all. It seems pretty clear X-Rite (the owners of Pantone) want more money than whatever they were getting paid from Adobe previously. So I guess Adobe is just going to remove the swatch books. It wouldn't surprise me if Corel chose to do the same thing.

I think it's clear what's going on. X-Rite is trying to generate revenue by trying to squeeze people they think they can squeeze. The prices of the physical Pantone color swatch books are already expensive on their own. But X-Rite wants people to sign up for a $60 per year subscription per computer to be able to use Pantone spot colors and do conversions in RGB, Hex, CMYK and CIELAB from them. Right now it doesn't cost anything extra. You can do that within CorelDRAW or Illustrator right now for free.

The move may very well backfire on X-Rite. Pantone is not the only color library vendor out there. There are several others. Plus, so many people design stuff in RGB regardless of knowing its limitations with print output. I the Pantone issue will make the RGB trend grow even worse.
 
dypinc

dypinc

New Member
Notarealsignguy said:
Sorry if this sounds dumb but were spot colors ever even intended for CMYK printing? Shouldn't you be able to profile your printer with other known values? I thought spots were more for offset and screen printing where you use a spot color ink rather than a blend? A lot of branding guidelines specify RGB, CMYK and Pantones for the same color so it is feasible that people would move away from Pantone if they had to pay for it.
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That is a good point.

In the world of digital CMYK printers be it inkjet or toner, Pantone Emulation is what it should be called and in fact some printer manufactures do just that with RIP color libraries that specify output values for their printer by bypassing CM for those named colors. While color libraries with LAB input values are also used with CM to generate output values which for the most part are very accurate until you push the gamut limits of the ICC output profile for printer media combustion. Beyond that specifying direct output values in a color library can be very useful to gain gamut and print higher gamut colors than CM will allow. This is were printing a color chart where CMYK output values are specified and then allowing you to choose the CMYK values that best match the color your trying to match becomes very useful. This is were setting the RIP input value in the design program to a named spot color that is in the a RIP color library instead or a CMYK or LAB equivalent comes into play allow you to bypass CM for that color and send the specified CMYK output values to the printer to best emulate that color from any color library not just Pantone.
 
brdesign

brdesign

New Member
JBurton said:
Hahaha! Thank god for the books I reckon. Do they even know all of their super secret color formulas (for process) are sitting on a bunch of sign makers bookshelves getting dusty? It's not like they change, unless they make up new numbers...

I noticed that a few months ago when I was trying to verify cmyk values and didn't want to march across the shop for the book. I should have known something like this was coming.

Any word if corel is going to keep these in on their own dime or start a secondary subscription as well?
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That's why Pantone keeps adding new colors and heavily advertising those new colors to designers as the trendy color of the month or year.
 
B

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Yeah, having to flip to the index in the back of the color book is pretty annoying. I'd prefer them to have the colors set in numeric order rather than the current system where it is (loosely) based on hue.
 
B

bteifeld

Substratia Consulting,Printing,Ergosoft Reseller
Pantone Color Manager, at least for some indefinite period, remains as the best path for batch downloading of L*a*b* values for Pantone fan decks. If you have an I1 spectro, you are
licenesed to use Pantone Color Manager. Pantone is trying to get everyone migrated to their monthly extortion service known as Pantone Connect, where you can look at individual
swatches for L*a*b* numbers, but cannot do full fan deck batch downloads.

As for spot color device ink build optimization, if you own a version of GretagMacBeth Profilemaker, you have a tool available known as Colorpicker which can take a palette of
colors(like Pantone fan decks) and produce optimized device ink builds given an ICC output profile for the media you are working with. A device ink build is the combination of
CMYK with any extended gamut inks(O, G, V, R) used to print the spot color., The modern follow-on product with this same capability is Colorlogic's Colorant L,
 
Goatshaver

Goatshaver

Shaving goats and eating bushes
bteifeld said:
Pantone Color Manager, at least for some indefinite period, remains as the best path for batch downloading of L*a*b* values for Pantone fan decks. If you have an I1 spectro, you are
licenesed to use Pantone Color Manager. Pantone is trying to get everyone migrated to their monthly extortion service known as Pantone Connect, where you can look at individual
swatches for L*a*b* numbers, but cannot do full fan deck batch downloads.

As for spot color device ink build optimization, if you own a version of GretagMacBeth Profilemaker, you have a tool available known as Colorpicker which can take a palette of
colors(like Pantone fan decks) and produce optimized device ink builds given an ICC output profile for the media you are working with. A device ink build is the combination of
CMYK with any extended gamut inks(O, G, V, R) used to print the spot color., The modern follow-on product with this same capability is Colorlogic's Colorant L,
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This is immediately what I thought when I saw this thread. Pantone is trying to get people into some sort of subscription service.

Seems like a bad move IMO. What did Klaus Schwab say, in the future you will own nothing and be happy about it.
 
rjssigns

rjssigns

Active Member
Adobe can get bent. Don't care if it's the so called "industry standard". They've gone downhill rapidly ever since the debut of their subscription model.

In the classroom they cause myself and my students more grief than it's worth and it's got nothing to do with Pantone swatches.

Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are loaded on my Mac. I've been doing my layouts with those programs or Flexi Pro. Only time I use Adobe CC is for coursework.

You can say whatever you want but it won't sway my low opinion of Adobe.

But but but everyone uses it. So what? My clients don't know nor do they care that I cranked up the artwork in Affinity or Flexi. They just know they got a quality product from my shop.
Let that sink in.

BTW I own both Affinity programs and Flexi. No monthly BS. Affinity recently had a Black Friday sale. $37.99 for any of their software.
 
C

ColorCrest

All around shop helper.
dypinc said:
So is Adobe going to start printing reference books for their alternative solution?
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Nothing, especially resources, is preventing Adobe from doing so.

Because Adobe does not need to reinvent anything whatsoever, they have the opportunity to rework a system which could be much more efficient that Pantone's. Adobe does not need to necessarily accommodate industries outside the scope of graphic arts as does Pantone. It's not a leap to imagine Adobe offering both a budget price swatch system and a premium price system either. Even a lean, efficient, budget system would effectively make Pantone irrelevant in the graphics market and possibly the apparel market as well. I suppose that might leave Pantone with the industrial design market.

Or, is Conglomerate / X-Rite / Pantone just hoping for a suitor?
 
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