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by TheRealPomax 1331 days ago
They want designers to pay for associating some area with a specific pantone code, not with "a hue" or "an rgb or cmyk color". The Adobe pallete is just a stand-in for the actual codes, so it's not about "they took away our colors", it's "they took away the mapping between what I'm working with and the pantone colors that get used when I actually send this off to a manufacturer" because what you pay for is Pantone's guarantee that if your product says it uses Pantone code X, it's going to look the same irrespective of who makes the physical thing, and irrespective of when you get it made. You use pantone when you need that guarantee, and you pay them for that. It's why their color libraries are so expensive: you don't get "neat colors", you get "if we say our product uses code X, on material Y, it's going to come out exactly like this". Not very similar, but exactly.

Freetone can't do that. It's just a palette, and kind of completely misses the point. Using some nice colors is trivial, anyone can make a color palette. Pantone is not that.
2 comments
Dylan16807 1331 days ago
It's not missing the point. You'd still use pantone for actual printing. This exists so the colors don't show up as black while you're editing.
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TheRealPomax 1331 days ago
*some colors

There's zero point in designing with Pantone if you're not going to use actual Pantone. Just use any palette (including this one) then.

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anikom15 1331 days ago
How do you know which Pantone color to specify when printing?
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Dylan16807 1331 days ago
You tell your printer "[Pantone] Green 0921 C" or whatever the color is. This is a compatible list with the same ID numbers.

You pick a spot color the same way you would have done it a month ago. And you print the same way you would have done it a month ago, except possibly with an extra annotation on the spot color.

The main use of this plugin is to let you actually see your spot colors instead of black while you edit. The secondary use is to give you a rough idea of the available colors, but you wouldn't finalize picking a spot color based on how it looks on a screen anyway, you'd get an actual sample.

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anikom15 1331 days ago
So Freetone maintains the mapping between its own Freetone colors and the Pantone colors?
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Dylan16807 1331 days ago
You mean all four of the ones up top?

Those were added to be cheeky. You can ignore them.

All the ones that say SEMPLETONE+ are 1:1 and don't need to be maintained.

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anikom15 1330 days ago
Okay, so I’m a printer. You specify a free tone which allows me to get the SEMPLETONE+ which allows me to get the PANTONE with a simple database lookup, and I just need to pay PANTONE for calibration essentially.

Is that correct? Where am I off?

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CharlesW 1331 days ago
> Freetone can't do that. It's just a palette, and kind of completely misses the point.

For sure. Stuart Semple appears to be an expert when it comes to ink and printing, which makes this feel all the more disingenuous.

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