ADOBE AND PANTONE IN DECREE NISI

Graphics giants Adobe and Pantone have divorced, or in Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous parlance, consciously uncoupled, meaning graphic designers can no longer automatically access Pantone inside most Adobe products. 

Pantone has now set up Pantone Connect, a $15 a month subscription service, which designers will need to pay to plug it into Adobe. Until now Pantone Color Books has been included in Adobe Creative Cloud apps.

Pantone has been part of Creative Cloud for eight years. Creative Cloud is the commercial print world’s dominant design programme. The reasons for the falling out between Adobe and Pantone are not known, but are almost certainly to be over licences and money.

No Pantone updates to Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop released after 16 August have been made to Creative Cloud, and from this month only three Pantone Color Books will remain; Pantone + CMYK Coated, Pantone + CMYK Uncoated, and Pantone + Metallics Coated.

Existing files should continue to work as before, although Adobe offers details of how files in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop may be affected. Industry insiders say the current Pantone libraries in Creative Cloud are mostly out of date anyway.

Pantone measurements were originally created to enable print businesses to mix spot colours on site from CMYK to create the exact colour specified by the designer to print in the fifth unit of their multi-colour presses.

Most digital print systems do not accept spot colours. Digital presses will seek to emulate a Pantone colour through CMYK, and orange or violet if they have it, but all are limited to the colour gamut of the printer.

Online forums have a plethora of information, tips and guides on working in the new situation. While often perceived as an art, colour reproduction is actually a maths-based science.

Pantone is not the only colour matching system on the market, but for the commercial print industry it is by far the biggest, dominating the market. It is owned by Danaher, which also owns X-Rite colour measurement systems, also the market leader in its field.