As long as you are spot ink printing using plates, that is…
For a year now Pantone has been switching over to Pantone Connect. You can try to contact Pantone, but in two words, Pantone Sucks. At just about everything they do, including “customer support” so if Sprainkles is getting a redirect to the pay-fer Extension, not much anyone can do about it.
Since they recommend you by new books every 12-18 months, good luck with something 3 years old.
The thing with Pantone Connect is that you can no longer download the entire Library like you could with the manager. You have to select colors individually and go through a few hoops to get them into your color palette. It isn’t drag and drop. It’s right clicking and adding. For every color you want to use (which granted, shouldn’t be many, but you don’t know my clients. )
The license between Adobe and Pantone expired 8 years ago and was incremental.
I guess they are at an impasse.
You can always copy the .acb files from your folders of current Adobe subscription and save them - load them into newer versions of Adobe that won’t have them.
But alas - it will only last so long.
I wonder how long before other software is affected by the move.
According to Pantones website Adobe is still listed
In your situation, you’ll need to contend with the mess. For me, though, it’s a minor change in an occasional routine since it’s rare to never that I’ve needed to precisely match colors.
I’ve never sent a spot color to a digital printer. Even when a client has corporate Pantone colors, they’ve always had CMYK or RGB approximations in their brand guidelines that I’ve used. None of my clients have ever been too picky about perfect color matches.
When I’ve specified Pantone colors for branding/logo design projects, screen printing, or offset, all I do is choose a color. I’m never trying to match anything.
Fortunately I can still go into the Swatches > Color Books, and find the standard colors there, but anything that was a new color will have to be through Pantone Connect. Sigh. Not the biggest problem ever but still.
We use Pantone all the time in printing, and have some pretty picky customers that have even rejected what we deem acceptable color variances using Pantone. They’re annoying (they get an annoying tax for that reason). Yeah I could just find the approximation in CMYK and convert to Spot, but Connect is easier at that point since boss paid for it anyway.
Yeah, it’s just another tool in the tool box you gotta have.
What’ll be interesting is how Adobe, Pantone, and print machine and media vendors are going to adjust. I mean, Adobe might be listed by Pantone because you can still print Pantones digitally from Adobe products using canned profiles built by media suppliers for the various machines and inksets out there. Canned profiles are not perfect, but if they don’t work at all because Adobe somehow blocks the code needed to make that work, or changes it up just to annoy Pantone, that could mean a real headache for everyone involved.
I’ve had only one client take up your attitude, Just B. He used to be picky about color matching. Now he lets us run on profile and if the finals match the proof but not necessarily the Pantone chip, all is good. But all the others? They will always be stuck with matching because not only do we match print, we are matching paint and powder coating and sometimes fabrics and laminates. Environmental and Experiential Design, man! It isn’t just the print world running on Pantone.
This is where I am at, too. Software subscriptions are built into my rate, and, if I have to, I can subscribe and adjust my rate if needed. But I am completely burned out on the subscription model. Heck, I’d be perfectly happy to cancel Netflix and Hulu, but my wife, who likes to have TV on in the background while she works, isn’t quite there.
Every place I’ve worked at has had Pantone colors but I’ve never actually had to use it. I’ve used a swatch book to find approx CMYK matches. I got pretty close resting on a few printers and the printshop.
I didn’t know adobe and Pantone didn’t have a license anymore. Kinda shocking. I wish I used Pantone more
That 1995 book is no good now, no matter how dark you kept it. Around 2000, Pantone changed the color formula. Then they changed them again somewhere around 2016 to combine the GOE inks that no one was buying so that they had to buy them.
It’s all one big racket.
Pantone is certainly making money with their swatches.
They sell INKS. It is their spot color inks, and the licensing deals they make with the digital printer machine makers and the media providers that make them the money.
They should give these swatches away for free cuz if designers use them, they sell more ink and digital profiles. I hope their ink sales tank. (that was a pun…)
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