Yup, especially since you also need to a buy a "sample pack" from pantone if you're actually doing anything serious with those colors (eg, printing, manufacturing, etc.), and those are not cheap.

Linus (Tech Tips) made a nice video a few days ago about that.

The good news is that it’s not a real problem.

If Pantone provides no value, just don’t use it. You can still type in any HSV, RGB, etc. you want.

That won't help you when you go to have those printed and they need to select inks. Or you want matching clothing items and need corresponding dyes.

That’s true. So if you need help mapping a digital colour to chemicals that will produce a similar colour on certain materials in certain light conditions, maybe there’s a service to be rendered.

I generally support the business arguments of this issue. The monthly fee seems kind of ridiculous and the work was done a long time ago and was included for free.

But too many times have I seen people warp the truth into a cute sound bite about having to pay to use colours. They’re not colours, they’re mappings.

You're vastly underestimating the complexity of this problem. In tech we're a bit spoiled because of how digital everything in our orbit is. This is why Pantone licensing for the web is so stupid. But when you go into industries that have physical products the cost these companies would have to do proper color matching on their own is where Pantone's system makes sense. They simplified, codified, standardized, and commoditized what used to be a painstakingly costly exercise.

So basically, they want some money to map RGB values to a set of numbers, each of which enumerates the output of a ridiculously challenging chemistry project?

For the web, yes which is just such a joke. For physical goods it's far more complex than just RGB.

> they want some money to map RGB values to a set of numbers

Sorry to reiterate this in another thread, but what they want is some money to map the output of a ridiculously challenging chemistry project to some RGB values that will give a vaguely similar impression.

Hmm, or the ridiculously challenging chemistry products could have spec sheets with spectra? Then other folks could work maps.

Though that would be failing to leverage dominant market position to extract maximum value. Leaving aside the "nice years of images you'all have there... it would be a shame if..." aspect of current events. To be fair, it's not like some (Si not color) chip makers with dominant position aren't "here's the spec... and if you want to actually use the chip, without massive reverse engineering, ask sales about your support and partnership options". And I suppose there's also "surprise, v2 is discontinued - to adapt your work to v3, contact sales".

I'm exploring emphasizing spectra in K-2 color content, to help disentangle the usual incoherent blur of material properties, physical light, and physiologic color. So I've wondered the last few days if Pantone somehow prevents scanning a chip set and posting spectra. As it might also permit "New Dryadtone(tm pending) Adobe palette to the rescue, now for only $5/mo! With our wonderful Palette Pricing Stability Guarantee!"

The mappings are for the monitor, and are not accurate because they can't be.

Pantone isn't selling mappings, they're selling formulas for colors. The reason you're paying for mappings is because they are mappings for workable representations of those formulas for colors.

If you never do anything for print, you don't need spots or Pantone.

The $15 they want is to map an RGB to a Pantone number, no?

> The $15 they want is to map an RGB to a Pantone number, no?

The exact opposite, but close enough.

> to also define which RGB values have a corresponding Pantone. Ie. “You can accurately print this number!

This is still backwards. Pantone has not gone through the RGB numbers and figured what inks they could make. Pantone has made inks, and when people need to work on a screen, with projects that will use those inks, they need mappings that will give them a reasonable enough approximation of the colors of those inks to do their jobs. What is printed will not match what is on the screen (irt color.)

> Give the printing apparatus these numbers and they’ll mix the pigments precisely based on formulas they have (and probably also paid for?)

Absolutely. But those numbers will have nothing to do with either RGB or CMYK, other than that approximations of those colors in RGB were used to do the design. Prepress people and designers are composing with RGB, but printing with Pantone. It's as if you composed an orchestra piece on a piano.

Okay thank you so much for sharing. I’ve really enjoyed this thread because it feels like I better understand the nuances of the issue and can better articulate my perspective on it.

You don't need a license to use any color in Photoshop. You need a license for a collection of stand-in mappings for spot colors, the vast majority of which can't be convincingly represented on a monitor.

You can ignore Pantone entirely, put in whatever color you want, and nobody will know or complain. You can even use any color you want in Photoshop, then make a plate out of it for the press, and tell people the Pantone color you want that plate to be printed with.

But I sense a lot of the self-righteousness about the topic is coming from people who think that Pantone isn't doing anything, that RGB or CMYK can represent every color and Pantone is just selling them back to you. This is not true. Is Photoshop digging into users pockets again with another subscription plan? Yes.

Pantone sells mixed inks in a bucket. Printing presses tend to only have cyan, magenta, yellow, black ink in them. The density of those inks varies naturally as a printing press runs. That variation isn't kind to business identity colors. It's not kind to photos either but human vision helps adapt to these variations, with some limits. Specific colored ink mixed in a bucket is much more stable on press, minimal variation.

There are other spot color systems such as Toyo, and Focoltone. But at least in the U.S. Pantone is the most common system.

> Printing presses tend to only have cyan, magenta, yellow, black ink in them.

This isn't right. Printing presses don't come with inks, you mix inks and load them onto the press. Printers tend to only have CMYK, and that's also not true for many high end printers, because CMYK is a very restrictive gamut. Hell, the reason for the K is because CMY can't do a good black.

There is a useful service Pantone is providing: when I want a physical thing to be a certain color, I can buy that color ink from them to get it consistently. But once I've applied the ink to the thing in question, it's mine like that forever. Imagine that Pantone demanded all of their customers to pay them protection money every month, or they'd send their goons to spray-paint black over everything you ever used their inks on. That'd obviously be completely unacceptable in the physical world, so why is it acceptable for them to do it to your .psd files?

I took two print shops digital, one before and one after Mac/Aldus/Adobe etc., so I'm getting enjoying this thread.

Nearly wrote "Maybe no license fees to map 271 year old color names in Adobe PSD files?" but thought that might be too obscure for HN. Apparently not. :-)

Good education below. To thread's point, in both cases (the watercolors, and Pantone), the work is in determining repeatable formulations, and building/maintaining a reference. It's inane, though, given the rest of ecosystem is licensed, to suddenly charge for the map in a PSD to keep working or go to black.