[WillAdams]

Please tell me how one is going to meaningfully make use of a PANTONE colour w/o using a spot colour printing plate in an actual colour job --- oh? You mean use the process builds which are still in place and which folks can still use?

I've always held that the spot colours should be an optional install, and only installable _after_ a user has passed a quiz on what spot colours and printing plates are.

[moolcool]

I am a normal pleb with a Photoshop license. I go to the paint store and see "Oh, I like this PANTONE 628 C colour. That might be nice to put on my wedding invitations", then go home and tell Photoshop "Hey, make the background Pantone 628 C". I am happy with how it looks, and save it. Then I go back a week later to print them, and suddenly it's all black. And that's okay somehow, because... I'm not using a spot colour printing plate?

[WillAdams]

You should have picked PANTONE 628 the CMYK process build, or the RGB Hex version if it wasn't a spot colour job.

Why would one select an option to use a spot colour intended for having a printing press print on coated stock if one wasn't going to have the job printed on such stuck thus?

How can the distinction between the colour representations be maintained w/o having a specific option for spot colour?

People who make the wrong choice should suffer the consequences of that wrong decision.

For my part, I want back all of my life and energy which has been used explaining what spot colours are, why it would cost a fortune to print a job w/ 23 spot colour plates, and why the job was converted to process and a charge made for said conversion.

[moolcool]

What an absurd assertion, that software should make me "suffer the consequences" after following a logical set of steps, just because I don't have a bunch of obscure knowledge about printing processes. The case I laid out is a perfectly reasonable one.

"You should have picked PANTONE 628 the CMYK process build, or the RGB Hex version if it wasn't a spot colour job"

To be frank, I don't know what the hell any of that means. But why should I have to? Why should I "suffer" because I don't know a bunch of gatekeepy factoids about the real-life differences between PANTONE 628 and B7DDE1? "Oh, sorry honey. You know that wedding invitation design I made last week and showed you? Well that's gone now, because I entered the colour we liked in the wrong format. It's my fault though. I used a colour palette intended for spot colour printing. What a goof! I am rightfully being punished".

Don't you see how this is insane? I can see a colour I like in real life, and see that there is a tag associated with that colour. I can tell that tag to a piece of software that I pay for, and have the software return a result I like. Then that software can, out of nowhere and without warning, decide to tell me "Oh, I'm not going to show you this colour any more". And then I'm expected to say "Oh, that's reasonable. I should have understood that the colour entry field I used was subject to cancellation, and only intended for spot colour for printing on coated stock".

[WillAdams]

The wedding invitation is still there, and if you submitted it to a printer to print as a spot colour job, would print fine.

If you want to print it on your CMYK inkjet printer, just choose the CMYK build, and if you want to put the image on your web site, choose the RGB hex representation.

Because Adobe doesn't have an option for substrate representation, there are two spot colour libraries (for coated/uncoated stock), and in order for a job to print properly on a commercial press, spot colours have to be identifiable so that a plate can be made.

To use a car analogy, it's like a person complaining that their truck needs diesel because they didn't understand what the diesel engine description on the window sticker meant.

[moolcool]

For the car analogy, it seems to me more like Ford pushing a firmware update to remove support for Ethanol based fuels IMO.

[WillAdams]

No, because they are consciously choosing an option which their needs don't support, and which every time their files are professionally printed someone needs to explicitly change.