- 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 held 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 $10,000 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 the sponsor?
Who's gonna help cover all this cost?
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- Pantone has been around since before the digital age
and today is best known for producing colour swatches
in various mixtures and materials
that aim to ensure that when you specify Pantone 1655-C
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 expectation
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 short circuit purple
or whatever else.
Even if they created their file with those colors
before Adobe and Pantone parted ways.
And it's this that me of 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 100% F.
And there is no ongoing cost argument.
Digital Inc 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 pacing 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 in 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 stopped 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 gonna 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 than, 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 cost 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.
There's just one problem with that.
Pantone Connect in spite of the apps
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 and 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 clinging
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 work around 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 the 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,
but 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
with Creative Cloud, you had that choice.
Some people even held onto even earlier versions
of Creative Suite.
And and I cannot stress this enough,
all of those people can still use Pantone colors
as outdated as they may be.
When you pay for access to software,
you're subject to the 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 CS 6 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 CS 6 in less than three years.
With the added bonus of not even getting to keep it
and your Pantone colors when you stop paying.
And what would happen to you as a subscriber
if Adobe's authentication service went down?
All right, 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 Pantone's.
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 GIMP?
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 wanna 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 outta 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 gonna 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 charging for 4K
only to have them bump my YouTube premium price
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That was a bit of a wild ride.