this tweet from Ian Anderson is a preview of what you'll see if you load a
file that uses Pantone colors in Adobe Creative Cloud after November 2022 and
if you think that's outrageous you're absolutely right creators projects are
suddenly getting help for ransom all because Pantone the color control
Monopoly got into a slap fight with Adobe the creative software Monopoly and
somehow managed to come out looking even worse worse than Adobe no one likes
Adobe Pantone did this to force users to
pay their own 15 per month subscription on top of what they already pay for
Creative Cloud and to say that the internet hated that would be putting it
very lightly to say that I hated that as the owner of a company that makes such
heavy use of Pantone that I spent ten
thousand dollars on their fancy colored
plastic would be like saying water is
wet but hold up there are so many questions right now like who even is
Pantone whose fault is all of this really is there a workaround and who's
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Pantone has been around since before the digital age and today is best known for
producing color swatches in various mixtures and materials that aim to
ensure that when you specify Pantone
1655c to a printer or fabricator your ad
or screwdriver or hoodie will definitely be exactly LTT orange unless the
producer messes something up it's a proprietary system and a Walled Garden
but when it works it works really well and we use it all the time at Creator
warehouse and for our own channel branding and while it's a pricey system
it saves so much time and effort going back and forth with Partners trying to
get a color just right that it's kind of
actually Justified they don't even need a color calibrated display because you
can calibrate right in the real world this convenience comes at a cost though
pantone's different material color matching books cost hundreds of dollars
each and that's what the expected education that they will ideally be
replaced every year or at most 18 months
take it from me rebuying this crap all
the time sucks but it also makes sense
considering that paper inks fabrics and
even Plastics do Fade over time diminishing the accuracy of the color
swatches which defeats the purpose entirely thankfully Adobe added support
for Pantone spot colors back in Photoshop 5.0 allowing you to use colors
in your digital art that can be easily verified by your printing partner the
problem is that those Pantone books I was talking about don't come with a
digital Edition or license to use them in for example Photoshop or illustrator
so when Pantone revoked the license that
they had previously issued to Adobe to include Pantone color books with
Creative Cloud end users were left with solid black instead of LTT orange or
ShortCircuit purple or whatever else even if they created their file with
those colors before Adobe and Pantone parted ways and it's this that pisses me
off the most the fact of the matter is that I'm the customer and when I look at
both Adobe and Pantone all I see is
massive corporations that are ranked as some of the most profitable Enterprises
on earth like Are you seriously telling me that Pantone so desperately needed to
make that extra little bit of money that they couldn't have just made a small
adjustment to the prices of their already ridiculously expensive books and
then on the other side adobe's profits have gone to the moon since moving to a
subscription model whatever Pantone was asking for could they not have easily
absorbed it even without raising prices but they didn't and besides Linus you
might say you took the complete opposite position with YouTube's 4K paywall
debacle and you're right I did but there's a reason it's because that's a
fundamentally different situation 4K video playback is a massive undertaking
in terms of development storage costs and the bandwidth cost to serve it
compared to lower resolutions that has a real cost a real ongoing cost such that
it outstrips whatever ad supported viewing could possibly sustain in the
long term and yes Google is a massively
profitable company that could simply absorb YouTube's losses wouldn't be the
first time but they're not obligated to and the Silicon Valley mentality is
Shifting right before our eyes YouTube as a business unit needs to get
profitable on its own if it's going to survive with Adobe on the other hand
well color accuracy is a core part of
their business the core service that they provide for any number of
professionals to have to do their work without color matching on what is meant
to be the set of tools for doing design work that's a hundred percent f
and there is no ongoing cost argument
digital ink don't fade and the whole situation revolves around what is
literally a collection of files that are less than half a megabyte in size this
is a licensing thing it's a pissing match and it has nothing to do with any
real cost what's worse Creative Cloud
isn't exactly getting any cheaper to compensate us for the loss and
functionality Adobe will simply be pocketing whatever amount used to go to
Pantone or using it to buy figma for example
now you could on that subject argue that
adobe has provided more and more features and services as time goes on to
the Creative Cloud Suite but that's sort of the point of a subscription model to
begin with isn't it if they stop adding features they couldn't even pretend that
they're not just rent seeking off of software they've long ago recouped their
Dev costs on and locked people into I'm not going to give them any bonus points
for increasing the power of their Monopoly here and for their greed both
Adobe and Pantone are now suffering a serious blow to PR over this dumb spat
that resulted in colors being removed
from creative software that has had them since at least
1998. for me though that's not the real
issue my question is if they can take
this away from me what else can they take away from me Adobe no longer sells
Perpetual licenses to their software products and Creative Cloud subscribers
are provided only one major revisions worth of older builds so if Adobe
decides unilaterally to downgrade rather
than upgrade some function you are going to be forced to go along with it whether
you like it or not I don't know exactly how this whole thing went down both
sides seem tight-lipped about it likely for legal reasons but I do have some
theories and the most likely one in my opinion is that Pantone saw that adobe
was becoming more popular and more profitable than ever and since Creative
Cloud has millions of active users paying for Access every month then gosh
dang it Pantone should get a cut of each of those subscriptions
whatever happened next Adobe likely told them to pound sand and Pantone connect
pantone's own subscription service that costs nearly as much per month as
Photoshop itself was born now you might
be thinking Pantone doing this is kind of the same thing as what Adobe did back
in 2013 when they transitioned from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud and the
parallels are there massively expensive
semi-regular purchases getting replaced with a smaller monthly fee that makes it
easier for Freelancers and occasional users to buy in but increases costs in
the long term that's just one problem with that Pantone connect in spite of the app's
admittedly cool features like color extract is pretty much useless on its
own you still need the regular expensive
purchases like the physical books to compare against
because even the most precisely calibrated cameras and displays have
fundamentally different color gamuts than inks and plastics it's the
fundamental reason Pantone exists to begin with when you buy these expensive
books and color swatches then in my opinion you should get access to the
digital databases for at least the usable life of the book say 12 18 months
now some of the listings mention it but none that I can find explicitly say you
get online access so unless I'm missing something here you are now being forced
to pay for your books and chips and a
monthly fee and in adobe's defense the
vast majority of Creative Cloud users people like photographers artists and
especially casual users have never and
will never use Pantone for much of anything the people who do have a need
for Pantone People Like Us at Creator Warehouse are the ones losing out and
as much as it pains me to admit it we are the ones who are most able to absorb
the extra cost looking at it from that perspective
while we'll probably never know what Pantone was asking for I can kind of see
why Adobe wouldn't want to absorb it or pass on an increased cost for pantone's
licensing to all of their users and if
I'm right about that I don't have the numbers to back it up then the outrage
from the internet at large might be a little overblown even if the whole
situation is hard to swallow Adobe isn't
innocent here either though if you've tried using Pantone in Creative Cloud
recently you'll probably have noticed that colors are straight up missing or
wrong because ever since Pantone started with connect Adobe has refused to update
them Pantone claims that the reason for this is that adobe hasn't bothered to
update them since 2010 and the facts seem to corroborate that why Adobe left
Pantone hanging like this is anyone's guess until one of the two fess up maybe
they're trying to build their own color matching system with blackjack and
hookers they certainly have the spare cash to throw around
the good news is that if you're one of those people who desperately needs to
cling to adobe's apparently quite outdated Pantone books and can't or
doesn't want to pay pantone's fee then you're in luck there are ways around it
at least for now for one thing three
books are still going to be part of the suite so you might not even need to
bother with any of this if you're covered by those arguably the easiest
workaround if you aren't though is to Simply copy the books out of your old
version and plop them down into the new one that doesn't have it this may not
work forever though and obviously those outdated books aren't getting any
fresher this way another solution is to
opt out of the Adobe experience altogether by using Affinity by serif
unlike Adobe Affinity does have the latest books from Pantone and you're
dropping a one-time fee to purchase the software though you do have to pay to
upgrade between major revisions just like you used to with Creative Suite
back in the before four times they also have the added benefit of having mobile
apps that don't suck then there's the other solution
I would never advocate for software piracy someone clearly does Photoshop
has long been one of the most pirated applications in the world and while many
people did sign on with Creative Cloud it never really stopped and this whole
situation is one of the reasons that Pirates Who otherwise have the means to
buy do what they do and if anything the
reasons they have for pirating Creative Cloud have only broadened and Adobe and
others who are looking to emulate this software as a service business model
should be taking notes think about it when you sign up for any software as a
service what are you actually getting you're not getting the software not
really you're getting access to the software and that's an important
distinction actually getting the software means you get to keep it and
use it in perpetuity it may not get support or major new features without a
paid upgrade but you have the choice to do that or not and up until Adobe
superseded Creative Suite 6 was create of cloud you had that choice some people
even held on to even earlier versions of Creative Suite and I cannot stress this
enough all of those people can still use
Pantone colors and outdated as they may
be when you pay for access to software
you're subject to the developer's whims yes it's often at a substantially lower
cost of Entry but how does it add up in the long term Creative Cloud might seem
like a steal at 55 a month compared to paying hundreds up front per app but
after just under four years you will have actually paid for the most
expensive all-inclusive CS6 package that
existed and that price which incidentally is what you're locked into
after the free trial comes with a yearly obligation that's right I still remember
when I found this out the hard way when I wanted to remove one of our Creative
Cloud Suites if you cancel early you get
slapped with a big fat fee if you want pay as you go instead it's 82.49 a month
and you'll hit that crossover point with CS6 in less than three years with the
added bonus of not even getting to keep it and Japan tone colors when you stop
paying and what would happen to you as a
subscriber if adobe's authentication Service went down alright we've seen
what happens the entire creative world screeches to a halt and if Adobe shut
down everything tomorrow literally everyone using Creative Cloud would be
screeched to that halt permanently no matter how much they've paid
this is the problem with software as a service and there are many parallels
with always online games and this situation with Pantone is as much
adobe's fault as pantones and Adobe is also responsible for the lack of
competition in this space that might give Pantone or their users any leverage
I mean what are you going to do use
they've already purchased most of the serious competition and the rest have
caveats that people in professional settings can't really work around if
they want to be able to collaborate with everyone else who's standardized on
Adobe Adobe has effectively created its
own little Monopoly sandbox and almost universally their users are unhappy
about it but like they always have they
ensure a steady stream of new users by supplying students with dirt cheap rates
to learn on so that they are well and truly hooked into the ecosystem by the
time they graduate in case you were wondering by the way how it came to be
that adobe became the de facto standard for professionals
all of which is to say neither Pantone nor Adobe are coming out of this
smelling like roses and The Biggest Loser as always is you the customer
this time we got away with a mere 15 a
month extra fee this time it only affected a small subset of users but
what will they come for next time what will they charge to get it back if
companies are going to provide this one price all access software as a service
experience only to have it be degraded like this and the users accept it you
can expect more just like it in the future
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if you liked this video go check out the time I actually went to bat for YouTube
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