Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and a couple of weeks ago in one of my videos I was
telling you about how Pantone is not going to be supported in Adobe products starting in March of
2022. So you won't have your Pantone colors inside Adobe anymore. I showed a workaround
in Illustrator how you can download the current Pantone swatches, and then use Pantone Connect
to get the new swatch colors. And that video will be right up here at the top of your screen.
For today's video, I went ahead and downloaded the free trial of Pantone Connect so I can show you
how to use it, and also give you my honest opinion and review of it. All right, let's get started.
Now, if you've already downloaded and installed Pantone Connect, you can just
jump to this timestamp in the video. And that way you don't have to watch
that process. If you do need to download Pantone Connect, you can just Google that,
and I'll leave a link in the description below. Now this comes with a free version and a paid
version that costs $7.99 a month. And I'll show you how the paid version works today. So I've
Googled Pantone Connect Extension, and we'll come down here to the adobe.com one. I'm going to click
that. You'll want to log into your Adobe account. So this will either say Install Now or Free.
Go ahead and click it and then you'll probably have to close Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
So after you do that, you can go ahead and hit Install and then Okay. I've already done that.
So go ahead and open Illustrator. I'm going to go ahead and Create New. We'll just choose Print,
Letter and Create. And then I'll come up here to Window>Extensions and >Pantone Connect right here.
And I'll bring it up. And if you haven't created an account for this,
it'll make you do that. You'll need to do like the normal email verification and all that.
I've already done that, and I've signed in. And you'll probably also have to do like a
one-question survey. Now if you just use the free version, you only have one thing you can do,
and that's go to Color, and Pick. And I show you how to use this with a screenshot in my workaround
video, which I'll put in the description below. You won't be able to use any of these other tabs
though. But since I've got a premium version, I'm going to show you how to use everything in here.
So first, I'm going to go over the way that I think most people will probably use this.
As I said, go to Window>Extensions, and then >Pantone Connect right here.
And you'll get this screen. And then we'll go to the Colors tab right down here. And we'll choose
Pick. Next, you'll want to choose what Pantone color book you want. And so I'll click this
button up here at the top. They're going to have different names than what you're used to probably.
So for example, solid coated is this Formula Guide Coated now. That's the one I always use,
so I'm going to click that one. And up here, I'm going to click this button to look at the options.
I'm going to make my chip size small, and I'll get back out of that. Now you can click a color,
and it'll populate to your fill and only your fill. So if you have your stroke selected,
and you click a color, it's still going to populate your fill. So just be careful of that.
If you have something selected, it's going to change your fill color and not your stroke color
even if you have that one in front. So that is one strange thing. I'm going to pull my swatches out
here. And you'll notice that this color, the one we click, does not come into your swatches at all.
So that is very strange. If you decide to make a new swatch with your fill, the color name doesn't
come in here. It doesn't retain the color name, so you'd have to rename this to Pantone or whatever,
and make it a spot color here. So you don't want to use this color as your swatch. What you should
do is find the color you want. And then there's these three little dots up here in the corner.
Click that and then choose Add to Swatch. This will add the color to your Swatches palette.
It'll be named correctly, and it'll be a spot color. And that's what you want. So we'll say
OK. As far as I know, this is the only way you can get your spot colors into your swatch panel that
I can find within this app. So once you have all the swatches you want in your swatch panel... let
me add a few here... I would go ahead and select those and just make a color group right down here.
Then you can come up here to the flyout and choose Save Swatch Library as ASE, or you can color some
objects in your document with those colors, and they'll always come loaded with that document.
But I would recommend saving this because otherwise you'll have to go through that process
every time, unfortunately. This part down here is saving a palette. So if you click the plus button,
you're going to make a new palette. Let's call this one Fall Colors. Now I can either pull these
down here, like this, or I can click on those three little colors and choose Add to Palette.
Ok, so let's save it. Now when we come over here to My Palettes, that will load right here,
and we have some options. Now, unfortunately, you can't download this as an ASE file within the app.
But I'll show you a way you can download the ASE. But those colors will not come in as spot colors.
They'll come in as process colors. They'll be named correctly, but they won't be spot colors,
so I would not recommend doing a palette. So getting your colors through the Pick option and
then saving as a color group is the way I would go about it if you want to make your own palette.
If you really want to grab from your palette that you made, we can go back to Google Chrome
and go to connect.pantone.com. And you can sign in here, go to My Palettes,
and you'll see your palette here. When you click the Download button here, you get an ASE file.
So let's do that. I want to show you what happens. We'll go back to Illustrator.
I'm going to go to my swatches fly out and choose Open Swatch Library and then Other Library. I'll
navigate to my Downloads, and by the way, it will not pull the name you saved. It'll just
always say Undefined, which is also very strange. Seems like a bug to me. Ok, so I'm going to
select this one and open it. Now if I click on the colors, it'll add them to my swatches. You can see
them right here. If I double click on one, it does give me the color name, that's a good thing. But
it does not give me spot color. So you have to go in here and change everything to spot color. And
then you'll want to go in here and change this to Lab. We'll say OK. So now when we double click it,
it's got everything we need. So it really does not make sense to use the color palettes. I would just
not use color palettes at all, if you're wanting to use spot colors. But if you're using process
colors anyway, palettes can be helpful. They just don't work well for spot colors. So in
My Palettes, you can scroll down and see all of the color palettes you've created so far. You can
share them with other people. But those people also have to be a subscribed member to Pantone
Connect. So their email has to be connected to a subscription. Then we've got this little icon.
And when you go in here, it just kind of shows you some different things you might want to use,
like a Colorblind simulation. I don't think I would ever use this little panel personally.
And then you've got your download. As I said before, you cannot download as an ASE file here.
You have to go out on the web for that. And it gives you the option here. But you can do
an Image Template. So I'll click that. And this gives you some different options here.
I'm going to click this one down here. This is actually pretty helpful if you're
building like a brand book or something like that. It has the RGB, the hex code,
and of course, the Pantone color itself. Unfortunately, this only comes in as a JPEG.
And I really just think it should be an SVG file with vector information and maybe typable fonts,
so we could change it to a branded look inside our brand book. And then the other option is
just delete it. Now if we go back up to the top, you'll see Shared Palettes, and these are all the
palettes you've shared with someone else who is also a Pantone Connect member. We've got Saved
Color Story. The color stories I'll get to in a minute because that's a whole tab right down here,
but you can find them here. Also, you can scroll a little further
and see Shared Color Stories here. Ok, let's move on to the Colors tab. I already showed you Pick.
So let's go to the Extract option. With Extract, we can choose a certain Pantone book up here
and then upload a new photo. Strangely enough, you cannot upload a PNG file. I thought that was a
little odd. JPEG is your only option here. So I'm going to upload a JPEG. And now when you do that,
your Pantone Connect window disappears. But to get it back, all you have to do is click on
your canvas. So here we have the photo, and we can drag this around. And when you release,
it'll try to find a Pantone color that matches that. So this is kind of nice. We can add it
to our palette, and I stand corrected. You could also add to Swatch here the
same way you can with the three little dots on the Color Pick page, and all of those different
options from the color pick panel. So if we choose Color Data, we can add this to our
palette. But as I mentioned before, I wouldn't do this. It doesn't get it into your swatch panel
in a way that is useful. So what I would do in that case is go back to Colors>Pick, type 1785,
and then choose the three little dots and Add to Swatch. And that way we get our
spot color that is a Lab Color Mode with the correct name. So I think this extract feature
can be pretty helpful. Ok, let's move on to Convert under Colors. With this option,
you can enter the RGB hex code here and then convert it, and it'll find the closest
Pantone color to that. So that is also a nice helpful feature. And now I'll choose Measure.
To use this measure section, you'll need to get a Color Match Card. And that is something that looks
like this. I have never used one and I don't own one, so I can't really speak to this part of the
app. But you'll also need to download the mobile app for this to work. Ok, let's move on to Color
Story. With this, you can upload different images, and the app will pull colors out of those images.
So I'm going to grab the three image template, and this one looks fine. So I'll click on that. So
let's tab or click to Add an Image, and then we'll upload an image. Same thing here, you cannot use
PNG files.... JPEG only. I'll just click and open this image, and then click back in Illustrator
to get it to show up. Then I'll click on the next one, upload image and do the same thing.
And I do want to mention that if you're using a Wacom tablet, this part is incredibly buggy. It
doesn't play nice with the Wacom. Try to use a mouse or a trackpad when you're using this part
of the app. So I've uploaded my three images, and I'm going to choose Extract Colors. Pantone has
tried to create a color scheme using these three photos. It's given us this color story palette
down here. So I can either click on these three little dots and Add to Swatches, or I can choose
this Add Colors to Workspace. I'm going to click that. I'm going to call this Color Story Palette.
I'll click the little checkbox and I'll Save. Now if we come back to My Palettes over here, we can
go to Saved Color Story and scroll down, and here is the palette we made. Now I mentioned earlier,
there's no other way to get those into your swatches. But now I noticed when I hover, there is
the option to add these to your swatches. So that is a good thing. Ok, let's go back to color story.
Basically, anytime you come to color story, you're creating one. And then you can find the saved
color stories in My Palettes right over here. Now I'm going to click on the last tab, which
is Trending. I don't see myself using this part of the app very often. But it does show the Pantone
color of the year, which honestly, I think that's just a marketing thing for Pantone, and then a few
other color palettes that might be helpful for you. And you can also click on Trend Palettes up
here to see some different palettes that have been made for different events and things like that.
So that is the Pantone Connect app in a nutshell. I think if you want to use this, I would stay
away from palettes unless you're using something that doesn't require spot colors. And I would use
just the pick option most of the time, and then use the three dots to Add to Swatch and make color
groups that way. So that is how Pantone Connect works. There are definitely some pros and cons.
The pros: You get all the new colors. It works ok for just adding colors to your swatch panel,
but it takes a couple of clicks to do that. It could honestly be so much easier. The cons:
Clicking a color doesn't add it to our swatches, strangely. What you should do is find the color
you want, and then there's these three little dots. Click that, and then choose Add to Swatch.
You can't download a usable ASE file from color palettes. I tested several different palettes
from different color groups, and nothing came in as a spot color. The colors are named at least,
but they're still process colors. This is the biggest issue with this app, in my opinion.
The app is so very buggy. Parts of the app just seem a little pointless, and some do not work
well at all. So overall, I give this app a three or four out of 10. It works, but it's
pretty clunky. And I think it just involves way too many clicks to get what you need. It also
feels a little unfinished, like they released it half done or something and I probably wouldn't
pay for it unless I was using Pantone colors all the time all day long. All right, if you
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