[German]Users who use Pantone color palettes (color charts) in files created with Adobe products will need a subscription to Pantone when using Adobe Creative Cloud in the future. Otherwise, only black colors will be displayed in corresponding documents, because Adobe has removed the relevant color libraries from Pantone from its products. The background to this is a licensing issue with Pantone, who are suddenly charging Adobe $21 per month in licensing fees per customer. Adobe is passing this on to users.
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I had already seen it in a tweet at the end of October 2022, but could ad hoc not figure out the implications. In the linked tweet someone writes that when you open Adobe Designer an existing PSD file with Pantone colors, they are displayed in black. You need a subscription of 21 US dollars per month to display the Pantone colors correctly again.
Users are shown a prominent notice when opening such files that there is a change. The Pantone colors have been removed and replaced with black.
The reason Adobe gives is that Pantone licenses have changed. Users who then click on Learn more are probably informed about the need for a subscription. I then came across an explanation from the colleagues at German site heise. There is a licensing dispute between Aobe and Pantone, and the companies could not agree, according to German Wikipedia. From late October / early November 2022 when opening PSD image files with Adobe Photoshop some of the colors of Pantone converted to black. Pantone charges users a fee of $21 per month for these colors.
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The Adobe document (see screenshot above) says, that from the the previously integrated Pantone color palettes, only "Pantone + CMYK coated", "Pantone + CMYK uncoated" and "Pantone + metallic coated" remain. Those who have used other Pantone color books (palettes) must purchase a Pantone license via a Pantone Connect plug-in, according to this Adobe document. That costs the $21/month – on top of the Abobe Creative Cloud monthly license cost.
What is Pantone?
Pantone Matching System (PMS), or Pantone, is the name of an internationally popular color system used primarily in the graphics and printing industries. It was developed in 1963 by Pantone LLC, an American company based in Carlstadt, New Jersey.
In 2016, the PMS contains 1867 spot colors, most of which cannot be achieved in four-color printing, and assigns designations to these colors in the form of numbers. As with any color system, the intention behind this is to simplify communication between those involved in the creation of print products, as information can be exchanged quickly worldwide with the help of Pantone color numbers, regardless of individual color perception.
Statement from Adobe
Adobe has reached out and send me the following statement on this case.
As we had shared in June, Pantone decided to change its business model. Some of the Pantone Color Books that are pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were phased-out from future software updates in August 2022. To access the complete set of Pantone Color Books, Pantone now requires customers to purchase a premium license through Pantone Connect and install a plug-in using Adobe Exchange.
We are currently looking at ways to lessen the impact on our customers. In the meantime, customers also have access to up to 14 extensive color books through Creative Cloud subscriptions.
How to solve that?
Within my German blog post I've mentioned, that it's not a huge problem, because the use of pantone color tables on a design project is expensive, and most designers are using only 3 to 4 colors. If they are using the basic pantone colors, nothing changed. Only, if the removed pantone color tables have been used within a project, the colors are renderd as black.
But this is also not a serious issue – German blog reader Manuel has commented on the case from the point of view of a graphic designer and explained why the issue can be defused quite quickly without the aforementioned $21 subscription. To do this, you need to know what the principle of spot colors and Pantone's approach is and what it has to do with graphics programs.
When working with spot colors in graphics programs, the color you see there is only for illustration. But this illustration should be as close as possible to the printing color, in order to be able to judge the result and in case you want to use the work also on the web as a graphic.
For printing, Manuel writes, only the name of the layer is relevant, because based on this the printer is equipped with the correct color (manually in the print shop). This works quite well with normal colors (yellow is yellow and blue is blue), with special colors with glitter, metallic effect or neon colors, of course, this works only approximately in the RGB or cymk color space.
Now Pantone comes along and provides standardized colors by defining the colors in question via color tables and charts. They are licensing the production of these hues (the well-known color swatches). This allows a design to be created in one place (say India) and sent to a printer anywhere in the world. Then, with the help of the Pantone reference, the correct color will come out (depends on the color impression but on the printed medium).
What is the issue with Adobe, asks Manuel? And then he explains that it is basically "only" a database in which the colors defined by Pantone are translated into RGB/CYMK/Hex codes in order to create designs that are then digitally as close as possible to the original color.
What happens in the graphics program? Basically, by selecting a pantone color, only a spot color channel is created with the corresponding name and the CYMK/RGB value. That's all it does, and you can always do that by hand with a little more effort, according to Manuel.
What has now caused uproar is the fact that even old project files opened with the Adobe programs suddenly showed black areas after the Pantone definitions were removed. Manuel writes about this:
In old projects that have only black areas instead of Pantone colors after the deadline, you have to look up which RGB/CYMK value Pantone intended for the colors, and reassign this value to the color channels, the projects are therefore not "broken".
That's a important point, and Manuel writes that integration with Adobe products has only ever been a labor-saver (and, from his perspective, is why Pantone was able to become so dominant in the first place). Then he argues:
After all, no one is preventing me from simply creating a solid channel with a corresponding name and the Pantone RGB equivalent and thus working with all available Pantone colors.
The necessary RGB/CYMK are on the (Pantone) color guides. Relevant for printing is only the NAME of the channel, not which RGB value is stored.
For Manuel, the problem is that very few people today use the pantone color tables to define colors. Instead, the projects are designed digitally on the iPad. The main source of income for Pantone, the sale of color tables, is slowly disappearing, thanks in part to Corona and accelerated digitization, Manuel argues, and suspects that the company will have to find new ways to monetize. With regard to Adobe, this ended in the case outlined above.
Manuel writes that in a project, however, one rarely designers works with more than 2-4 Pantone colors (to expensive). Therefore, without the integration of the Pantone color tables into the Adobe programs, the effort is minimally higher, because you have to name the channels yourself and enter the RGB equivalent. This takes 5 seconds and is not a big deal.
In existing projects, black is displayed for the time being for the omitted Pantone color table support. However, the name of the channel has not changed and is still correct. Ergo, according to Manuel, the designer need to enter an RGB value himself for the few colors used. He only needs the reference values and the project shows color again. So no real problem.
What remains? The issue has been handled quite clumsily in my eyes. The message from Adobe that users received when they called up a project indicated that they had to purchase a license from Pantone by subscription. Skilled / experienced designers can fix that within a minute.
