Pantone has removed its colour matching system from standard Adobe Creative Cloud products, forcing users to pay an additional $15 per month to use their industry standard print reference tool.
Pantone is a company best known for its Pantone Matching System, an industry standard system for matching digital colours with printed results.
Colour matching systems like these are integral to all forms of print media, where digital colours can look different depending on the software used and the screens they are displayed on.
Pantone sells physical books containing swatches of standardised colours that can be used to get an accurate reference of what a digital colour will look like when printed.
This allows print professionals to classify and match colours across all kinds of software and hardware.
While Adobe used to provide support for Pantone standard colours in its Creative Cloud Suite, covering industry standard software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, this access had now been put behind a paywall.
Existing Adobe files containing Pantone colour information now register as plain black. Users will now have to pay an additional $15 a month to Pantone on top of their monthly or annual Adobe subscription to get access to these reference colours.
Re-saving existing files which used Pantone information without buying the new licence will remove all colour information from the files.
This, in effect, holds an individual or company’s old and current projects hostage for the ransom of an extra Pantone subscription.
It is worth noting that Adobe holds a de facto monopoly on many forms of media creation software, from photography to document management. Pantone commands a similarly intimidating market share for colour standardisation.
It is unclear what led to this change in licensing from either Pantone or Adobe. While many would justifiably baulk at additional costs on top of Adobe’s sizeable Creative Cloud monthly prices, it may be the lesser of two evils.
Professional designers working with print products are those most affected by this change, but also tend to be the ones most able to absorb the cost. Upping the price only for those who need this specific feature is surely a better solution than passing those costs on to all Adobe customers as a whole.
There are already alternatives to the official Pantone system crawling out of the woodwork in response to this change. British artist Stuart Semple has released a free plugin for Adobe products called Freetone, which contains colour reference information that just happens to be an exact match to Pantone’s colour system in all but name.
Pantone cannot, obviously, own actual specific colours and prevent people from recreating them. Instead, its system of standard classification is copyrighted alongside the physical books it sells for reference. Since it uses a different naming scene, Freetone allows users to continue using standard colours that can be checked against the physical books from Pantone, which are used across the print industry.
Others have resorted to pirating the colour information, simply copying and distributing the colours from Pantone’s system using standard formats like HTML hex codes.
IOL Tech