But if there is a 1:1 mapping from Freetone to Pantone, shouldn't this still work? Crappy thing is that Pantone wants designers to pay for the ability to associate some area with a specific Pantone hue.
Adobe pulling a product feature from paid customers existing install/subscription because they failed to licence the feature properly from the supplier is crappy.
Pantone is, in my option, being somewhat unduly attacked for this change. This is 100% on Adobes head.
Pantone have been a popular punching bag for the design industry for 30 years. And it may be true they over charge for what they offer. But this is Adobes f*up.
Frankly, a 1:1 mapping of Pantone to Freetone sounds like copyright infringement.
What I would love to see is a new “free”/libra/open colour system, superseding what Pantone offer. Let’s not just copy people because we feel slighted.
And the idea of copyrighting colors is ridiculous.
Absolutely, however at least here in the UK (and I suspect the EU), copying the Pantone colour book would be classed as copying a “database”. Databases are copyrightable, whether you agree with that or not.
My argument is rather than doing something that drags the copyright debate into to situation just make something better and “free as in beer and speech”.
Copying something that is “copyright” to “free it” puts you on the back foot. You will loos the argument eventually.
And you could still install individual colors in that case, right? The average project shouldn't have many.
It does seem like Adobe could have mapped the colors in existing files to a useful hex code instead of blacking them all out.
They don’t copyright the color. The copyright the product associated with the color.
You can use the same RGB or CMYK colors. You however don’t get the guarantees of what the spectral responses of that color are and you don’t get the guarantees of printers having palettes to match the color.
I can tell a printer to color match a pantone swatch without violating anything.
They charge Adobe for the right to include their database of colours in their software. Adobe failed to negotiate a sustainable relationship, and sold a product to customers under the pretence of including the Pantone database, then pulled it.
A lot of people used the colors as just a nice useful palette. In hindsight that was never a good idea.
I know no person who uses pantone seatches and does not know about spot colors. And my environment are self thought people not professional graphic designers.
Whithout having put any research into this at all, it would not surprise me if Pantone tried to use that lever.
Adobe should have anticipated this and ensures they had perpetual licensing in place. It’s ridiculous that the largest graphics technology company in the world have managed this so badly.
Frankly I don't know why Adobe haven’t either acquired Pantone at some point in the past or developed their own alternative standard. It’s such a blind sport for them.
I would argue that the Pantone colour library is effectively an API for reproducing specific colours as paint (with the context that APIs are largely protected under fair use).
Pantone should be compensated for what they do. They should have the option to recoup their costs but not necessarily by restricting others from using their published digital interface for colour-to-paint reproduction.
They should be able to maintain IP rights for the tooling they build to faithfully reproduce those colours as paint and their trademark should obviously be protected but the actual colour codes themselves? How is that any different than say Google using the same API for Oracle's Java for their alternative JDK & JVM?
At the end of the day in both cases, the useful part isn't the API/colour codes but the tech used to actually run Java/reproduce those colours faithfully as paint.
I would roughly say that Pantone is a specific arrangement of a set of specific items, with the arrangement intentionally conveying a unique meaning to the set. Just like a book or a picture or song or a piece of code.
(IANAL, I don't intend that definition to stand up in courts, just describing how and why it makes sense to me that it could or should be treated the same way)
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.
For sure. Stuart Semple appears to be an expert when it comes to ink and printing, which makes this feel all the more disingenuous.
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.
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.
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.
Is that correct? Where am I off?
Or better, I export the file saying PANTONE.
For the printer, nothing changes.
This plugin exists so that designers don't have to pay $21 per month per seat for effectively nothing. It's not an attempt to shun Pantone entirely.