Adobe and Pantone Breakup

The international colour and design standards that are no longer working together

If you follow the design or internet news, you have noticed that the design community is upset with Adobe as they discontinued support of Pantone colour libraries as of November 2022. While they had been warning customers as early as March that year,  the removal of support with the November Creative Clouds updates caused a raft of problems for design professionals around the world. So we are going to explain what Pantone is, why there’s such a big problem with Adobe discontinuing support, and how it effects you when you want things to be printed in the future.

What is Pantone – A quick overview

For the non-design professionals reading this might be wondering what Pantone is and why it’s so important. Simply put, it is the industrial way of how we define colours (although not the only one.) They created a massive library of every visible colour, giving each one a unique code. They worked out how to make that colour using every manufacturing process, be it paint, dye, injected moulded plastic, stained glass, and so on. From the 1950’s onwards they released annual libraries (in the form of colour fans, huge folders, or racks of samples) keeping up with technology as it improves colour reproduction. 

Why does this matter? The reason for these libraries is to ensure that when a business orders anything of a given colour from their suppliers (ie a hundreds of bolts of 300 thread count polyester fabric in Pantone 542) that the supplier will supply the exact matching colour requested. If there was not a colour standard, then different products would have different variations of the same colour leading to wastes of time and money trying to get the correct colour match. While there are other colour library standards out there, because of Pantone’s absolute dominance of the market it’s the industry standard.

So what’s the problem? It’s the cost. Because of their dominance, businesses have to pay the price that Pantone decides. To buy the most basic Pantone reference chart, that’s $400 NZD. The bigger folders cost $1000+, and the reference sample racks cost tens of thousands. On top of that you might have to buy different sets for each type of printing method or material type. And it’s something you have to do every 12-18 months because the colours in those charts fade/wear over time losing their accuracy. Even their digital app costs $25 a month and you still need the physical colour libraries due to the wide colour variance on phone and computer screens.

So where does Adobe fit into this?

Just as Pantone has absolute market dominance to dictate what people have access to and for how much, the same goe with Adobe and the control of design software. Over the decades, Adobe has both bought out the competition and used hugely discounted prices to ‘train’ students to use their software so that’s what they want to use when they work for businesses. Once there were dozens of competitors back in the 1990’s, now there’s just a few left fighting over the scraps as Adobe controls the market, setting the standards and prices.

One of the things that they couldn’t control (or buy) is the colour library standards, which Pantone dominates. So to be competitive they made a licensing deal with Pantone to include their libraries as part of their software. As design across all industries moved to the digital space, having the Pantone charts as part of the software made it easier for designers to ensure that what they created would look the same when it was made into physical items. And for a lot of designers it cut down the cost, as long as they kept their screens colour calibrated they could make Pantone accurate work without the annual costs of buying the physical reference libraries.

So why is there a problem now?

Now all of what I am about to say is speculation on my part. Neither Adobe or Pantone has made public what is the cause of the problems between them. My suspicion is that it all has to do with both money and control of the market. 

In 2011 Adobe announced the release of the Creative Cloud software suite, replacing the annual purchase of the Creative Suite. Their argument was that it would be cheaper for people as they could pay for month by month use or pay for a year at a discounted rate, ‘making it cheaper’ than the previous annual releases. It was also about the same time that Adobe stopped updating their Pantone libraries. 

I would suspect that with the shift to a subscription service, which netted Adobe more income, they had an existing licence with Pantone for an annual a per user fee. Any new editions would have meant new licences and Pantone would most likely want the licence to be renegotiated as a per user per month. That would have cut into Adobe’s profits so it decided to just keep the last library running till the existing licence agreement expired and then discontinue support. This is also why Adobe would have been pushing their own colour libraries so much, one less expense for them and even more control of their marketspace. And since Adobe no longer supports most of the Pantone libraries, they are happy for those few businesses who really need the libraries to go to Pantone directly and pay that company’s licence fees instead.

So what does it mean for you and your printing?

For the vast majority of our customers, it means absolutely nothing. They don’t use either Pantones or Adobe suite. They use the programs they want and pick the colours they like and don’t mind if the colours of the finished item aren’t 100% exactly the same (Which we can’t guarantee due to the nature of printing.) This problem effects the professional designers or clients who have paid professional designers to create their material which includes Pantone colours. As we see it, here’s the nature of the industry going forwards.

• There are still 3 Pantone libraries supported by Adobe
  If you use Pantone CMYK coated/uncoated/metallic colour libraries in your work, those are still available for the foreseeable future. The reality is that the first two are used by the majority of Adobe’s customers and if they abandoned that they would lose subscriptions very quickly.
• Printers like us are still able to print files containing Pantone colours
  This issue only effects the creation side of the print industry, not the production side. Our toner printers are calibrated to print a range of colours from the Pantone CMYK coated / uncoated libraries and this won’t change as the manufacturer’s licence this directly from Pantone.
• Existing files using the unsupported libraries should be uneffected
  Adobe says this, but there have been many reports saying otherwise. It’s happened to us several times where we open older files and the unsupported Pantone colours are turned black. 
• PDF files are uneffected
  The Pantone colours are saved as part of PDF files and can’t be changed by this problem. It will only become an issue if you then edit the file in Adobe as you might get the same problem as mentioned above.
• You can translate the existing Pantone colour into CMYK within Adobe
  Unless you’re in a very specific situation where work requires a pantone colour coded in the production process, all printing these days is translated to CMYK at that stage, so you can remove one step by doing the translation yourself.
• Some designers will have to licence the Pantone Libraries direct from Pantone
  Everything else is software as a service so why should this be any different. If you are in a business where you need to have access to the physical Pantone Libraries, then the cost of the monthly licence isn’t going to make much of a difference on top of the hundreds spent for physical ones. 
• Preexisting alternative colour libraries are available.
  There are already several different existing colour libraries used throughout the world, some that are open licence, such as the RAL standard. The only issue is that because Pantone is the dominant player there are less production companies that support them.
• People have created alternative to the Pantone libraries for use in Adobe’s Creative Suite
  Some of these alternatives have been around long before the Adobe/Pantone split, others have been created because of it. These alternatives use a legally distinct but comparable colour coding system to let people make use of the correct standard colours in their design that can be translated to Pantone when needed. Here’s two that have downloadable replacements for the Adobe libraries,  Swatchos and Culture Hustles FreeTone. Are they are not 100% exactly the same as the Pantone libraries, no, but they are close enough for most general use situations.

What will the future bring?

Maybe both sides will listen to their customers, unlikely as it might be, and set up a new agreement to bring the libraries back into the Creative Suite. Alternatively as people get frustrated with this problem, it will lead to an open standard to be universally adopted by all areas of the design and production industry. Most likely, this is the new normal for designers. Those who need the Pantone libraries will pay for it and the rest of them will just accept some colour variance in their CMYK colours when put into production.

No matter what we will be here to help you get your printing and design sorted with plain language answers and simple solutions.