[nerdponx]

The creator does have experience producing physical paints and pigments, so they are aware of the points you're making.

The purpose here is not to replace Pantone entirely, but to be able to represent Pantone colors somewhat faithfully in digital documents. Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore. This is meant as an alternative.

[brudgers]

Pantone formulates, tests and manufacturers bespoke pigments and dyes, then makes the available for purchase.

The creator does have experience producing physical paints and pigments

Unless the creator can overnight formulated inks to my print shop, it is not a practical alternative to Pantone, because Pantone’s business is selling consistency in markets where consistency matters.

I am not saying it is not a nice piece of work, but it is only applicable where consistency doesn’t matter very much…and though that is most of the time for most people regarding most things, what you get correlates with what you pay for.

[tln]

I think the idea is the palette contains the same colors.

So if I have a file that was using some spot colors such as PANTONE 576 C, I can sub those colors for TEMPLETONE+ 576 C, which look the same on screen.

When I send that to your print shop you could presumably do the reverse process, then print with the same inks you did last week. Everyone is happy, except for PANTONE.

[anikom15]

Print shops can’t just magically replicate any on-screen color on print, even if the print color is defined by some paint formula. There are too many variations involved. There has to be process for calibrating the equipment and accounting for variation in the materials to get a proper match. You still need a company like Pantone to provide that, even if you want to use a slightly different print color that looks the same as another Pantone color on-screen.

[nerdponx]

My point is that nobody is debating this! This is entirely about having an "unencumbered" set of RGB approximations to those same colors. When you send your design to the printer or whatever, you still need to specify the actual Pantone colors.

[Dylan16807]

True, which is why Pantone should be happy even if you don't pay the subscription fee, because they're still going to be used plenty.

Making it harder to describe your product in terms of Pantone colors hurts them, which is the dumbest part of this situation.

[capableweb]

> True, which is why Pantone should be happy even if you don't pay the subscription fee, because they're still going to be used plenty.

That doesn't sound right. Pantone is a for-profit company who doesn't get paid unless you pay something to them. They do not get any money from you just using anything Pantone.

If Pantone was a non-profit/FOSS project then sure, they would be happy for any type of usage. But they're not, so not sure why they should be happy if people are not paying.

[ehvatum]

> But they're not, so not sure why they should be happy if people are not paying.

Because of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389848 your use of Pantone colors for free causes your print shop to spend huge sums on Pantone goods and services.

[tln]

Sure, I didn't suggest otherwise.

FWIW I don't think this "freetone" library is very practical. Pros who need it will pay the $15/mo to pantone, in addition to the $99/mo they pay to Adobe.

[brudgers]

I don’t own a print shop.

By “my print shop” I meant one I am in a business relationship with.

[madeofpalk]

Pantone also sells a list of rgb colors for photoshop. This is what this is replacing https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/illustrator/kb/pantone-plus.html

[amelius]

Can't we just represent colors using the underlying physics? Like how ray tracers represent them?

[someweirdperson]

Description of the spectrum? That would provide different descriptions for what looks the same. Also, it would require a description of the spectrum of the light source lighting the colored surface.

But it would be great. Two differently produced paints would look the same under all lighting conditions.

[amelius]

That's not entirely true. Nonlinear effects exist. E.g. fluorescence can cause emission of one light frequency after being hit with another.

Regardless of that, you could also make a physical model of the human retina, and use that to remove any parts from the model that you think are redundant.

Also, the tools that Pantone uses to map colors have some kind of built-in physical model already, I suppose (not a Pantone expert obviously).

[mikeryan]

If using Pantone compatible colors in Adobe is necessary for your business you can license the color palette for use in Adobe products and pay the $15 a month for it.

Cost of doing business.

[hakfoo]

The problem is that it wasn't a cost of doing business last month. So if someone used what was an ordinary feature in their files, they can no longer open them in any usable manner-- apparently it maps everything to black.

Okay, Adobe and Pantone have decided to do a bold business decision that breaks existing files. That's their perogative. But in terms of minimizing bridge burning, their goal should be to fail tactfully and with as little lossage as possible. For a comparable, if you loaded a 12-bit-per-channel high-dynamic-range file in a software stack that only supported 8 bits per channel, the right answer is to discard the least significant bits, not just throw up your hands.

A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."

[haneefmubarak]

> A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."

I don't quite think Adobe would be allowed to do that though. If what Adobe was previously licensing on your behalf was the translations from Pantone codes to RGB/CMYK and the files saved with Pantone colors only have Pantone codes, then the best you could do is list the missing colors and ask the user to manually substitute in color choices from available color spaces for each missing color.

[kabes]

> Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore

This is wrong, you can still use the rgb approximations.

[Bjartr]

But existing uses of Pantone colors will be appearing as black, not their RGB approximations, unless you pay $21/mo. from November on in Adobe products.

[Angostura]

What a ludicrous business decision

[genmud]

Having been on the receiving end of things like this, it’s likely outside Adobes hands. I had a product where they changed licensing to a revenue sharing model, asking for 10% vs a flat fee. Problem was, only like 3-4 customers out of hundreds were using the licensed feature. Long story short, it made it unsustainable and we quickly dropped the technology.

[donatj]

Sure, you can still use the colors, but they're removing the picker for them.

[CuriousCosmic]

They are also making it so anything that previously had the colour selected using the picker is set to black unless you pay them a licensing fee.

There is obviously value in Pantone and what they do but the digital representation of Pantone's colours should be treated the same way APIs are.