You're Going To Have To Pay To Use Some Fancy Colors In Photoshop Now (kotaku.com) 236
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: It's very likely you don't give a great deal of thought to where the digital colors you use originally came from. Nor, probably, have you wondered who might "own" a particular color, when you picked it when creating something in Photoshop. But a lot of people are about to give this a huge amount of their attention, as their collection of PSD files gets filled with unwanted black, due to a licensing change between Adobe and Pantone. As of now, widely used Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign will no longer support Pantone-owned colors for free, and those wishing for those colors to appear in their saved files will need to pay for a separate license. And this is real life.
The removal of Pantone's colors from Adobe's software was meant to happen March 31 this year, but that date came and went. It was then due for August 16, then August 31. However, this month, people are noticing the effects, reporting issues with creations using Pantone's spot colors. And the solution? It's an Adobe plug-in to "minimize workflow disruption and to provide the updated libraries to the Adobe Creative Cloud users." Which, of course, costs $15 a month. It's Netflix, but for coloring in!
However, Pantone still states in its out-of-date FAQ that, "This update will have minimal impact on a designer's workflow. Existing Creative Cloud files and documents containing Pantone Color references will keep those color identities and information." Yet today, people are reporting that their Photoshop is informing them, "This file has Pantone colors that have been removed and replaced with black due to changes in Pantone's licensing with Adobe." Others have reported that even attaching a Pantone license within Photoshop isn't fixing the issue, colors still replaced by black, and workarounds sound like a pain. "Graphic Design How To" on YouTube offers a workaround for Adobe users.
"Another tip suggested by Print Week is to back up your Pantone libraries, then re-importing them when your Adobe software updates to remove them, or if it's too late, finding a friend who already did," adds Kotaku. "There's a good chance this'll work, given Pantone's colors are stored as .ACB files, just as the rest of Photoshop's colors."
"Or, you know, you could just copy the metadata values of the Pantone range."
The removal of Pantone's colors from Adobe's software was meant to happen March 31 this year, but that date came and went. It was then due for August 16, then August 31. However, this month, people are noticing the effects, reporting issues with creations using Pantone's spot colors. And the solution? It's an Adobe plug-in to "minimize workflow disruption and to provide the updated libraries to the Adobe Creative Cloud users." Which, of course, costs $15 a month. It's Netflix, but for coloring in!
However, Pantone still states in its out-of-date FAQ that, "This update will have minimal impact on a designer's workflow. Existing Creative Cloud files and documents containing Pantone Color references will keep those color identities and information." Yet today, people are reporting that their Photoshop is informing them, "This file has Pantone colors that have been removed and replaced with black due to changes in Pantone's licensing with Adobe." Others have reported that even attaching a Pantone license within Photoshop isn't fixing the issue, colors still replaced by black, and workarounds sound like a pain. "Graphic Design How To" on YouTube offers a workaround for Adobe users.
"Another tip suggested by Print Week is to back up your Pantone libraries, then re-importing them when your Adobe software updates to remove them, or if it's too late, finding a friend who already did," adds Kotaku. "There's a good chance this'll work, given Pantone's colors are stored as .ACB files, just as the rest of Photoshop's colors."
"Or, you know, you could just copy the metadata values of the Pantone range."
Additional note (Score:3)
If you don't go to Stanford, you won't be allowed to use cardinal red anymore.
How can anyone "own" a color?
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Informative)
They don't own the color.. they own the name reference to the color.
Apparently Adobe software has this concept of a named color where they can record the fact that these pixels are this certain named color, and not just the raw numerical values of the color channels on each pixel.
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Re:Additional note (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been a long while since I've used photoshop in any serious capacity, but iirc it can go to a lot of lengths to ensure a strong correlation between the colors on-screen and how they show up in-print. It's a feature set mostly intended for graphic designers.
A new project file from a clean install has no concept of this, so if you give it a generic set of RGB or CMYK values, it has no idea what color name that might mean.
But, if you elect to use a named palette, and bother to go through the screen color calibration process, you can be fairly certain that what you see on screen is how it will show up on your chosen printable media (again, you'll first need to tell it the printing process and media type for it to stand a chance of success).
Photoshop is at least an order of magnitude beyond Gimp and paint.net in terms of potential for complexity.
If Pantone wants to enforce licensing at the project creation/editing level, that's their bean to sell. Personally, I think it's rather foolish, and they should instead be collecting at the printing stage, but again it's their decision/problem.
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Print is dead
You're delusional or blind.....
Re: Additional note (Score:4, Interesting)
Such ignorance. I'll ignore the print is dead post and jump straight to you silly digital comment by which I think you mean that all devices have a native understanding of what a colour should be and all devices are outputting the same way as every other device right? Wrong. Digital didn't make it easier, it made it harder to get colour consistency, even among calibrated devices it is impossible to match or work with certain colours.
Named colours allow designers to work with a known target medium despite it looking wrong (or potentially not being being able to be displayed at all) on their workstation.
Pantone is just as relevant as ever.
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Such ignorance. I'll ignore the print is dead post and jump straight to you silly digital comment by which I think you mean that all devices have a native understanding of what a colour should be and all devices are outputting the same way as every other device right? Wrong. Digital didn't make it easier, it made it harder to get colour consistency, even among calibrated devices it is impossible to match or work with certain colours.
Named colours allow designers to work with a known target medium despite it looking wrong (or potentially not being being able to be displayed at all) on their workstation.
Pantone is just as relevant as ever.
Yes, it is. It's been a while since I've used Pantone colors, but it takes a whole lot of pressure off the designers to know that the color they specify will be the color that comes back.
The print is dead and Pantone doesn't matter people probably never do print media.
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If Pantone wants to enforce licensing at the project creation/editing level, that's their bean to sell. Personally, I think it's rather foolish, and they should instead be collecting at the printing stage, but again it's their decision/problem.
If one of the RGB or CMYK values was changed by one, would the colour change be perceptible? If not, wouldn't that constitute an end-run around the licensing?
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Try getting those colors to print properly on different types of paper.
Re:Additional note (Score:4, Informative)
Gimp basically works with RGB pixels. What an rgb value (x,y,z) refers to depends on the colour space, not just the values of x,y,z. In turn, that depends on your screen, which is why pros need calibration. The Pantone system is all about ensuring that, after all that is done, the colour that comes out at the end is the colour you intend. That sort of precision is impossible in Gimp, and for all Gimp users, is essentially unnecessary. It's only if you're working with professional printing and such that you need this.
Re: Additional note (Score:3)
A colour in this case isn't just a set of RGB (or CMYK) values, it's a name, some colour values and some metadata to ensure the colours look correct on any properly calibrated device. Also I suspect that lots of places that do printing and publishing will be able to take a file with pantone colours and ensure what comes out of their presses or printers is what the designer expected.
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You've basically have your arguments out of order.
The reason pantone exists is to ensure the proper colors in print.
The stuff on screen is just an approximation and could be way off as long as you know the print shop is going to print the right color.
This is the point of pantone. Even if your design tools are unable to properly reproduce the color you want you can still define these colors and send them for print. It's a real-world color reference.
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It's not really about names or calibration, it's about consistency.
If you define something as a Pantone colour in your file, and then send it to a commercial printer that supports Pantone, you can be sure that the printed copy will be that exact colour. To help with this you can buy Pantone colour swatches that are guaranteed to be correct, regardless of things like the calibration of your monitor. In fact some of those colours are beyond what most monitors can even display.
It's used anywhere that consisten
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Informative)
it's got nothing to do with the color picker. You can input any color code you want.
However, if you reference a Pantone color, and as a designer, you often do because then you're guaranteed that color will be that color. It's entirely possible to use a Pantone color, then color another swatch using the RGB/CMYK value and end up with two different swatches of color. The Pantone color is guaranteed to be identical across all processes and time, so if you print something out using Pantone colors, you know what you get, even if you print it out tomorrow, next week, next month, next year - the color will appear identical across all runs. If you use the color picker, there's no guarantee that that color will be identical from run to run. Pantone works with manufacturers to ensure a level of consistency and mixing that works across batches.
It also applies to other media - plastics, for example. If you need your plastic to be a specific color, Pantone will ensure your run will be that exact color run after run after run. You can bet the big guys who have trademarks on the certain color of items have a Pantone color to go with it. I'm sure companies like David Clark, Fluke, Sierra Wireless, Lenovo and others all have Pantone colors specifying the color of their earcups, the cases, the antenna topper, the red trackpoint and other things.
Of course, the problem could be handled better - I mean, there are options - including the conversion to raw color values and other things.
Oh so naive. If you think Pantone is just for print, you're sorely mistaken. Pantone colors apply to everything, even manufactured goods that need to be a specific color.
And just because it's digital doesn't mean it's exact. Inks vary in color from batch to batch, plastics vary in color from batch to batch. Paints do too. If you just specify the raw values you're dependent on the specific formulation that was used that day.
If you use Pantone colors, you're guaranteed that what comes out is the exact shade you wanted, no matter what the variance in the batch.
I'm sure you can probably do it by calibrating everything to the Nth degree every time you change the ink or batch or whatever, or you could just rely on Pantone to have done that for you already.
Finally - print is not dead - just look around at all the printed material - from packaging to boxes to other things - those are the the items most likely to rely on Pantone colors than say, your local newspaper.
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The Pantone color is guaranteed to be identical across all processes and time, so if you print something out using Pantone colors, you know what you get, even if you print it out tomorrow, next week, next month, next year - the color will appear identical across all runs.
That appears to be a statement of theory. It looks like, in practice, you get the exact opposite of that. What I am curious about is what branch of intellectual property law is being used to enforce this? It can't be (or shouldn't) be copyright, since surely the color names are not long enough and, collectively, they're just a list, not a work. I don't see how it could be patent law since, aside from it being ridiculous to allow a patent on this, I'm sure that a patent should have run out by now. Of course,
Re:Additional note (Score:4, Informative)
That appears to be a statement of theory. It looks like, in practice, you get the exact opposite of that.
Except you're missing the obvious point. Whether someone fucks up or not isn't the issue, the issue is whether you have redress or not. If you go to and print a project with a shade of orange with a certain RGB value and the printer comes back with something that looks different, tough. You now get to argue who is calibrated correctly.
If you go to the printer and say you wanted Pantone 723C and it comes out with a different orange you hold up the colour chart and say "this is Pantone 723C" you either re-do the job to meet the contractual obligations or you'll find yourself in court. Then you smugly smirk and walk out.
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If you go to the printer and say you wanted Pantone 723C and it comes out with a different orange you hold up the colour chart and say "this is Pantone 723C" you either re-do the job to meet the contractual obligations or you'll find yourself in court. Then you smugly smirk and walk out.
Well more likely rather than smugly smirking and walking out you put your head in your hands and weep about the fact that it's now impossible to make your deadline and your boss is going to demand to know why you didn't have them print out a sample and check it before they printed the whole run. I get the general idea though. However, that's not what I was talking about. You're missing the obvious point of what I was saying.
What I was talking about is that now, instead of "the Pantone color is guaranteed t
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The fuck? You do your test provide right at the deadline? It's quite clear you have no concept of how graphic arts or design works.
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It can't be (or shouldn't) be copyright, since surely the color names are not long enough
First of all they have Patents [justia.com] over manufacturing technologies that utilize the Pantone reference system to set color output.
Secondly Trademarks and Copyrights for the references themselves.
Thirdly contractual rights. You have to enter into a contract with them to actually obtain the color references, and they're quite expensive - Like $20 Per color chip. A full set of color chips costs about $10,000.
Finally SOME
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Thank you for a wonderful explanation.
It didn't even occur to me that the colour of something other than print (e.g. a manufactured product) might also require precise reproducibility.
Much appreciated; thanks.
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How so? There is Pantone color with name "Cappucino Foam" that has in Pantone system the components [red=246,green=243,blue=232]. Surely if I use color picker and enter the values and you do the same then we will be both looking that the same color (assuming calibrated device). Or not?
So how is it different saying "Cappucino Foam" compared to saying "[red=246,green=243,blue=232]" or "#f6f3e8" ?
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The difference comes when you send your RGB values to a manufacturer and it turns out that the thing you ordered doesn't have the same colors as the picture on your screen.
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"RGB" values are meaningless without a specified whitepoint and specified gamma curve. It's just three numbers, without any additional description of how to translate them to physical reality. That translation will be different depending upon the output medium, be it a CRT monitor, TFT-LCD display, OLED display, laser printer, web offset-printed magazine, dyed fabric, coloured plastic, paint, or whatever else you can apply colour to. Pantone unifies the colour specification for all of these media.
Did you
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So, I'm asking because the information appears to be scant, but does that mean that you can't even input the color by RGB values without a workaround?
*Last line of TFS has entered the chat.
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Their swatches correlate to real-world color swatch books, and print vendors can calibrated to specific Pantone books. Print hardware doesn't output the color 100% the same as another vendor or printer. You generally need to perform test prints and things like that to get colors to match what is expected. Pantone swatches are designed to help with that.
Everyone's display will show colors slightly differently as well. When you use these swatches, you can reference Pantone books to know exactly how a color wi
Re: Additional note (Score:2)
Now that I think about it my favorite song Black Hole Sun takes on a new meaning, and the video shows the adverse impact of such a world where the colors are owned by someone else
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Informative)
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To take your example, 19-4052 TCX, the binary representation of this colour, if even representable, differs according to the colour space you are using. So for professional graphics, being able to say 'these pixels are 19-4052 TCX' is necessary, but for everybody else it's nowhere near as important. Those professional clients can pay through the nose because they can afford to pay as much, and can charge their clients sufficiently. I doubt I would personally need to ever refer to a Pantone colour.
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But color matching is automatic in a digital environment? It only really matters if something is spending time in physical print, where the ink quality, sun fading, scanner calibration, or digital camera calibration can affect the color?
It seems more like Pantone is trying to squeeze a little last bit of revenue out of a dead technology? I think everyone would be better off if they'd defund their lawyers and instead invest that money into R&D for a new product or technology that people are going to ca
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Colour matching is not automatic and in some cases flat out not possible digitally. Different mediums have different capabilities and many print processes have a gamut which can both exceed or fail to meet the monitor you are working on.
How do you work around that? Well you look at your colour chart and type the named Pantone value in rendering the fact that your screen can't display the colour in question irrelevant.
To your example. 23,116,82(RGB) would look very different for you then me since the colour
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Pantone owns the color code.
I've asked this in another post, but it seems like this really needs an answer, so I am asking here as well: _How_ do they "own" the color code? What branch of intellectual property law allows this? Pantone is not doing business as 19-4052 TCX and they can't seriously claim that literally thousands of different colors are all individually associated in the public consciousness with Pantone so I don't see how it can be trademark. Any "invention" of tying color codes to particular names would have been "inven
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How_ do they "own" the color code? [...] Copyrighting a color is absurd.
It's not about the individual colors or color codes.
Copyrighting a factual list, such as a list of colors is also absurd and is a classic example of something that is not meant to be copyrightable.
Is it really just a 'factual list' though? These are very specific colors, carefully curated. It would be hard to argue that Pantone's list of colors is anything other than a creative work.
After all, that's the important thing here: creativity. Not all lists are, er, created equal.
Remember web safe colors? Those were also very specific colors, but there was no creativity in their individual selection. Yes, the method by which they were selected was ce
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It's not about the individual colors or color codes.
Not sure how it's not. You have an image composed of pixels in some sort of indexed image with a color map that maps to these colors. The image editor is not mixing ink, etc. it's just representing a particular color with the color code.
Is it really just a 'factual list' though? These are very specific colors, carefully curated. It would be hard to argue that Pantone's list of colors is anything other than a creative work.
Yes, it is just a factual list. Consider a phone book. Those are very specific names and phone numbers, carefully curated. It's easy to argue that a phone book's list of phone numbers is a creative work. The list of Pantone colors is basically a list of catalog numbers. You
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You're completely free to make your own independent set of colour codes. If you want to make your own standard based upon physical measurements with a spectrophotometer, no one is stopping you.
You're not paying for the codes. You're paying for the whole Pantone process of colour mixing, which ultimately produces the physical reference swatches for physically matching those swatches to the output of your process to ensure they are aligned and you are getting the specified colour exactly. I've done work in
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Intellectual Property Rights
The Pantone Sites, and all data, text, images, software, video or audio contained therein are for your non-commercial and personal use only. The Pantone Sites contain trademarks, copyrights and other intellectual property owned or licensed by Pantone. No license to such intellectual property rights is granted to you. Any reproduction, publication or other use of the contents on this website require Pantone’s prior written consent.
And
Before using, understand that the colors shown on this site are computer simulations of the PANTONE Colors and may not match PANTONE-identified color standards. Always consult PANTONE Publications to visually evaluate any result before utilization.
So not only you can't use what Firefox shows you professionally, at least not legally, and Pantone does not make any guarantee that the color you are seeing is the actual standard. For most people, it doesn't matter, but if you are in the business, it does.
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Informative)
That's because you don't understand it.
The colour you see on your monitor is some mix of specific narrow chunks of wavelengths of red, green and blue. Those will vary depending on whether you have an LCD+LED backlight, LCD+fluorescent backlight, CRT, quantum dots, microLEDs, plasma, whatever. Even two monitors of the same technology, or two different spots on the same monitor, will produce slightly different spectra for a given RGB value.
You can calibrate two monitors to give the same approximate experience in your brain for a given RGB value (or a subset of them anyway), but it does require calibration. Now, if you're going to print something out, you have to deal with inks of various types depending on the process. And those are probably CMYK. So there's a conversion. But two printers won't give the same result, so there's another calibration too.
Now, suppose you're actually making something out of plastic. Those are dyes. Conversion and calibration. Or maybe you're printing on glossy paper? Guess what? More calibration.
Pantone defined a system of codes so you can encode your colour as XYZ and someone's calibrated monitor should show a decent approximation of it (provided the lighting is standard), you can send it off to a printer and they'll make a good rendition of it (Pantone colours specify the type of paper, not just the colour), or you can send it to an injection moulding factory, t-shirt printer, custom car painter, whatever, and they'll be able to get the colour correct.
There's a significant amount of testing, calibrating, and standards writing involved. But if you need to get Facebook Blue the same on every t-shirt, annual report, and company car, you're going to use a standard.
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Informative)
It's slightly more than that, but you've certainly got the right idea.
The important part of Pantone's PMS colors is that when I specify, e.g., PMS 286 C (a quite nifty royal blue that I even have on an official Pantone mug), and I send it off to my print house as tagged with that value, the print house knows exactly what kind of inks to mix in order to obtain exactly the same color with their process, thanks to a butt-load of effort on the parts of the printer manufacturer, the ink manufacturer, and Pantone.
Moreover, when you buy a Pantone color swatch set, that specifies the color profiles for *any* *lighting* condition. So if you are using a high-quality print house, the PMS 286 C they print should look the same as the official swatches under incandescent, fluorescent, LED, or daylight illumination.
Naturally, you pay extra for these sorts of guarantees. And you get replacements if the delivered product is demonstrably different (I've had one case where the lackey must have picked the adjacent page from the swatch book to mix his inks ... took a while to get that sorted out, but I got my items reprinted gratis).
Which reminds me, I need a new set of swatches; mine are well beyond their expected lifetime.
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Interesting)
And it's not just the color. Pantone apparently contains the definition of how the color looks in different lighting conditions and also at different angles.
At first I was disgusted that Pantone "owning" a color is even a thing. But what they own is the formulae of how a certain color will look like on certain substances and in certain lighting conditions at certain angles. *That* takes a lot of trial and error and experimentation, which is why there is no adequate open source replacement for it. They put the money down to do it, so they get the formulas they created.
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So why not calibrate everything for RGB instead?
Because that's not how printing works. When you mix RGB you get white.. White is not the end product when mixing inks.
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Actually they can, it's just a case of having an appropriate colour space for the colour in question. The issue is *devices* are not able to display said colour. You could for example use Pro-Photo RGB as a colour space which covers nearly all the visible spectrum (and includes RGB values that correspond to imaginary colours, literally mathematical concepts rather than anything we are capable of seeing) but that doesn't help you if your monitor (like 99.9% of those out there can only display sRGB.
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RGB is a mixing process, it is not a target colour space. You can calibrate to a colour space, but critically not all devices have the same colour space size.
The issue is some workflows may use colours outside their space. When referencing fixed Pantone values you could in theory create a project on your screen using a colour that even your expensive high end monitor is not actually capable of displaying. And yet when you go to print you know exactly what colour you are going to get.
If you're using an offs
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RGB is just a single color space -- specifically targeted to monitors.
When dealing with printers, they often split up the color space into CYMK. There are rough translations between those, but CYMK can express some colors that RGB can't.
When dealing with anything with dye based printing (like screen printing or mixing plastics), the color space you use could be CYMKOG (or something completely different).
The list goes on and on. What Pantone gives you is the translation between all the different color spac
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There's absolutely no reason you can't do all of that with just RGB though. RGB is just a way of mapping a color space. All you need is a standardized way of defining what the RGB values mean in terms of actual frequency and intensity. Regardless of whether you're using 8 bits per color channel, or 5 for red, 6 for green, and 5 for blue or whatever, each channel represents an intensity for that particular color that, when merged in the display, will simulate a particular frequency of light at a particular
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There's absolutely no reason you can't do all of that with just RGB though.
Oh, where to even begin...
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There's absolutely no reason you can't do all of that with just RGB though.
Please, by all means, begin. RGB is just an approximation of a real frequency of light that happens to line up with how our eyes perceive color. Let's say that you have rgb code #8F00FF which is a violet color. Your retina is not actually experiencing pure violet light at around 400 nm, but your eyes and brain tend to see it that way. If you experience RGB in that combination at the appropriate proportional level, the typical eye can't tell it from actual 400 nm light. However, different people will perceiv
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but colors are almost always achieve by mixing,
Not in the real world. In the real world colors are achieved by subtracting, not adding. The objects themselves usually don't produce light, they reflect and filter variable external light.
so Pantone colors are normally going to suffer from exactly the same problem of not producing the exact same color
Not if you use them for the purpose they are designed for which is a real world color reference.
So, if you have a set of standards defining exactly what real-world levels or each part of the RGB color space represents, you can convert that into a precise color.
You couldn't do this because that is not how colors work.
There's no reason for that mapping to belong to just one company though.
That may be true, but there is no reason for there being 20 of such mappings and the industry settled mostly on pantone.
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You're wrong, but it is a whole story and way too much to write about here. I'm sure there are many sources on the internet that will explain it.
Consider that your statement that there is a definite relation between your RGB values and the stuff you actually see on your screen is nonsense and take it from there.
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I mean, I guess that's what Pantone is doing, but it was monumentally stupid to let one company own that. It also makes absolutely no sense for them to still own that.
There are other companies that have done what Pantone has done. Most have either stopped or no longer produce their references anymore.
Before I went to college, one of the print shops I worked at also supported the Kodak color matching system (their matching system started with 'KE-xxxx'. Pretty much the same idea as Pantone, but Kodak was hyper-focused print to glossies and newsprint. From what I remember, there was also a 3M and maybe another color system as well. Pantone became the standard over the
Re: Additional note (Score:2)
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It's really crazy to me. Worse, not only do they demand payment for colors, they demand RENT. $15/month. It doesn't sound like much, but it'll add up fast.
Of course the people being fleeced are also willingly renting the primary tool that allows them to pursue their profession.
This is the sort of crap that makes me insist on Free software.
Re:Additional note (Score:5, Informative)
They don't demand payment for colours. They demand payment for a process service to ensure projects with colours you are using remain accurate outside of your device. You're free to use any colour you want without paying anyone anything.
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There is no free software equivalent. In fact colour management in free software is pretty poor overall. Inkscape can't even output CMYK natively.
The biggest issue is that there is simply no libre equivalent of Pantone. If you want to get your business cards printed the best you can do is produce CMYK and hope that it comes out looking a bit like what you had on screen.
Building a free library equivalent to Pantone is not trivial. It's not just a list of colours, there is a lot of metadata that printers and
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I've never heard of anything so fucking daft.
That's because you don't understand colors in the real world.
This is just naive "creatives" who are often technophobes
Yeah, everyone who does something you don't understand is a technophobe. That's the dumbest fucking thing said in this thread.
There are very good technical reasons to use something like pantone in certain situations. You're just too dumb to understand.
Allowing one of those corporations direct control over all your work in perpetuity on their "cloud"? What a scam.
That's a completely separate discussion. It has nothing to do with color standards.
Color piracy (Score:5, Funny)
"Or, you know, you could just copy the metadata values of the Pantone range."
But that's piracy! You wouldn't download a color!
Re:Color piracy (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to the granular monetizing of everything (Score:2)
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Apple is obviously over paying Adobe for PS, something that is no longer an integral part of the OS, she we are seeing it disappear.
These legacy product are going away as we move to modern standards that often give us more value for our dollar.
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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Everything is going to be grayscale!
Yeah? With which gamma curve?
diseny to buy blue green red (Score:3)
blue green red
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Gradients? (Score:2)
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Most likely, it only applies if colors were selected by name rather than raw RGB values.
It's not like it's going to plop in a SOPA-like black box to overwrite Pantone Black.
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This isn't about colors, it's about references to colors. See, RGB colors are really only useful for computer graphics. They're just about useless if you're, say, manufacturing something and want part of it to be a specific color. That's where Pantone comes in. I can say that I want such and such to be Pantone P 51-1 C and it will be a very specific boring beige.
What do they consider the closest RGB equivalent to Pantone P 51-1 C? Pantone will happily sell that information to you. (They don't want yo
If you're still renting Photoshop.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're still renting Photoshop, I don't feel sorry for you. When you don't own your software, you get whatever they give you. And this is the result.
Next time a company tells you that they're moving a subscription model, tell them "no".
Re: (Score:2)
Or to put it another way, if you keep working with Adobe long enough, you're bound to get bricked.
Re:If you're still renting Photoshop.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Just try to say no. Adobe screws you anyway.
I used to use an Adobe Acrobat utility, Distiller, to produce pdfs for my class. It was part of a series of tools that I had cobbled together over the years to generate individualized documents for each student.
Every few months or so, my workflow would go sideways. 99 out of 100 times, it was Adobe's fault. They'd update distiller, without my permission, and screw up the settings.
They pulled that stunt once too often last Spring. Exasperated, I finally sat down and learned how to get the same result using Python. I was so happy to purge Adobe Acrobat from my computer.
Hello, my name is jmichael and I've been clean for 185 days.
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"Or, you know, you could just..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Fixed the last line of the summary. I use Affinity Photo: no monthly subscription fees and a low cost perpetual license. I have also gotten all my updates for free for the last couple of years. I don't usually like to give shout outs to particular products, but in this case I feel it was necessary to help as many people as possible move away from the Adobe mothership.
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So does Affinity Photo support fixed Pantone colour references? If not then you've missed the point. You're not offering people alternatives, you're telling them to stop doing their job.
Sorry, but especially in the industry people cannot just "not use Photoshop".
Proprietary, non-open, fun! (Score:2)
Use other editing programs instead?
Dunno if Gimp supports Pantone colors, but I bet if it did, it'd still work..
I appreciate Adobe Creative Suite CS5 (Score:2)
It's a bit long in the tooth at this point, but it works great and I know it well.
And I own it.
Switched to PowerDirector for newer video stuff.
SAAS? (Score:2)
re-importing them when your Adobe software updates to remove them,
The article mentions modification (or at least an alteration in rendering) of 20 year old files. How is that possible? Is it by modifying the application installation via an update? If so, can you get the functionality you originally had in the 90's by using an old, non-networked desktop installation of Photoshop?
Tip (Score:2)
SaaS in action (Score:2)
Gotta love how all the dystopian predictions about Software as a Service that were called misinformation and conspiracy theories are coming true one by one.
And the gap between "this is a conspiracy theory" and "this is a reality today" seems to be getting shorter.
Pantone doesn't own any colors. (Score:2)
They merely own special names and such for those colors.
They can take my ... (Score:2)
has everybody forgotten... (Score:2)
Why we all got the Pentium instead of the i586?
I get it that Adobe wants, to some extent, to "play nice" with a major player in the advertising/publishing/commercial art space where they do a lot of business, but surely there are some lawyers somewhere who can go back in time and look for precedents...
Intel was about to follow-up their i486 with the i586, but they were getting rather honked-off by AMD rolling out each new competing chip and calling it the same thing. Intel rolled-out the i286, and AMD did
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This RGB24 is what Pantone apparently wants to own, or more-likely, they want a trademarked label for that RGB24 and want to control the association of that label with that number - sort of like crayola trademarking the names on the crayons.
Nonsense. What they define is how a particular color name translates to a real world color.
It is a color reference chart so that you can know what the final color of your product is going to be even if you don't have a proper representation of that color on your screen when you design the product.
Clicked the Youtube link (Score:2)
It definitely looks something like only a hipster Apple user would care about.
Signal to noise is great in this thread. (Score:2)
I actually learned a lot about Pantone by reading replies. I've heard about it for decades, but only now do I get the utility. Pantone is clearly valuable, unless your work spends its entire lifecycle without ever leaving the monitor. Seems like if you want true cross-media consistency, this is worth paying for.
Ironic Coincidences Pt 348 (Score:2)
So design using RGB/CMYK and then ... (Score:2)
When you send your work out for print/mfg, just include a key code that says "XXYYZZ" is actually "Pantone 032" and you can still use Pantone for press, without having the extra licensing during the design phase.
It's ridiculous they want to charge for it during design, it's a clear double-dipping on their behalf. Pantone already charges everybody on the printing/mfg side, and now they want to charge others to calibrate to that? It seems too much.
Well, that didn't take long (Score:2)
When Adobe went to a "rent not own" model for Photoshop, I asked myself whether I really needed the cutting edge version. I didn't, and felt sorry for one of my best buddies, a graphic designer who absolutely did. So I hung onto my outdated version of Photoshop and started learning the GIMP. This has worked out fine for me. My needs are limited, and between the GIMP and CS6, I'm OK.
Just a few weeks ago, my buddy formally retired. I'm going to call him later today, and we'll both have a good laugh about
Re: (Score:2)
Yes:
https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/ [xkcd.com]
Re: Open Source This! (Score:2)
That comment about "skin" color made me lol. It's kind of weird because there aren't really any colors that describe white skin, because it's not actually fucking white. Other skin colors have names that *gasp* actually look the color of their skin, except black, which still at least has an actual name: dark brown. And no, white skin isn't fucking peach, or even tan.
...Take that Pantone! (Score:2)
That's an informative link. It clarifies the colors for:
And it's crowd-generated, open-source and free. Take that Pantone!
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hmm, chart colors.
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Just type a color name into your Web browser and you'll get a dozen sites with RGB/HTML code suggestions.
But do those sites also provide, in addition to the RGB code, the exact composition of polymers, ceramics, and metallic paints, that will show that exact same color under a 6800K fluorescent light at an incidence angle of 35 degrees?
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Nope, they don't. That's the point. :-)
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Depending how many ADC bits you want to dedicate it, you can represent more colors than Pantone will *EVER* trademark.
Surely you mean DAC bits. And the purpose of something like pantone is not to trademark every possible color. They are a reference for how colors come out in real world manufacturing processes. The color of a paint has no direct relation to RGB values, even the calibrated ones.
Is there some potential consumer confusion between RGB 0xFF0000 and a Pantone "Red -- I doubt it.
Sorry to inform you, but it's much worse than just confusion. The colors simply do not match magically. There is absolutely no confusion that there is a problem to be solved. You just don't understand the problem.
Pantone made a partial taxonomy, no more, no less.
And by doing so they
Re: (Score:2)
You're not sorry and you "informed" nobody.
I really am. Well, its more a kind of pity.
And if you want to talk ADCs then you should understand that getting a value of #FF0000 from an ADC that is processing a red color is very unlikely and if you do get #FF0000 from a DAC then you can bet your ass on it that it is not a correct representation of the real world color. There is, indeed, 'consumer confusion'. By looking at a red color in real life it's not possible to assign a single RGB value to it and make that RGB value uniquely describe that real wor
Re: (Score:2)
Who the fuck is talking about these colors being patented?
Do you even know what a patent is?