Given information that Pantone palletes will be removed from Adobe software libraries this March, and Pantone focusing on promoting their Pantone Connect extension subscription model, i was wondering if anyone heard anything about it regarding Corel software.
I believe Adobe will get a slice of the Pantone pie. Access via their applications to get your pallette gives them a slice. Corel and all others may go the same way.
Technology it will be a mess for awhile. Pantone standardized on LAB conversions for all their palettes so new development is not a problem technically.
However as an example if you dump Pantone but want to create a color pallette with colors, say Pantone 286, that have equivalent LAB, grayscale, RGB and CMYK values (which you must do to have a viable pallette) where does that intersect and cross the boundaries of intellectual property.
Would it be a violation to even call it an equivalent? Would any colors that convert to identical values in LAD, RGB and CMYK as Pantone colors do be a violation?
The technical issues of RIP conversion has to be addressed for older and newer applications. Then users, some use the LAD default, others RG and CMYK.
Don't worry guys,Pantone will survive! In the worldwide graphic design industry, many professional clients will require such references. And it will pour down to the eventual smaller graphic design companies that will have no other choice but to follow.When as a graphic designer, either freelance or company, you will run into this obstacle of not having the colors imbedded in your system, to anyone but graphic designers, they don't give a hoot about what it takes. You'll only look unprofessional and risk losing clients instead of the opposite.Pantone has been another industry standard and so well distributed worldwide. Of course they will lose some clients, but they never had them beforehand, anyway. They have NOTHING to lose, all to gain.
I'm not worried about Pantone surviving, I'm wondering how the pricing structure will affect users. Let's face it if the LAB number for a Pantone color is recognized as intellectual property then the game gets interesting.
I think there are paths Adobe (or others) could follow to develop a rival spot/process color library to Pantone. There are already rival companies offering swatch books and digital palettes bundled into software, Trumatch being one example. So Pantone doesn't own that entire concept.
It's doubtful Pantone could try to claim ownership of specific LAB color values, such as the value used to describe Pantone 286 Blue. A color is just a color. On the other hand, if Adobe simply made a carbon copy of Pantone's colors and just changed the naming I think they would get into legal trouble.
The situation may have similarities to how typefaces are legally protected. A typeface designer or foundry can't copyright or trademark the actual shapes of letter forms. This is why we have various visual clones of Helvetica, such as Swiss 721 or Nimbus Sans. But the name of the typeface can be copyrighted or trademarked. The digital font data is very much copyright-able. If a rival type company tried to re-sell Monotype's Helvetica Now font files under a different typeface name they would get into a lot of trouble. That's what happened to a junk fonts company in the early 1990's when they tried to re-name and re-sell Adobe's Font Folio fonts as their own product. You can legally make a visual clone of a typeface, but that typically involves drawing up the letter forms from scratch and doing all the kerning work from scratch as well. Helveti-clones mostly look identical to each other, but they'll vary to some surprising degrees when the letter forms from different clones are laid on top of each other. Even the "legit" versions of Helvetica have many subtle and not so subtle differences. The 1983 "neue" cut of Helvetica is very different from the original 1957 version. The recent "now" version is unique as well.
If Adobe were to develop its own color library system it would have to be distinguishable from Pantone's products. There are considerable gaps in Pantone's spot color range, the color spread is not all that even. A hypothetical Adobe color library could address that.
I don't think Pantone has as much leverage over computer users in the graphic design industry as Adobe. As I said earlier, some of us will have no choice but to pony up the $60 per year per computer Pantone wants for their Connect service. Not everyone has to output their work to print. And not everyone doing print graphics work actually needs to use spot colors or make any reference to them. Over the past 30 years I've seen a lot of liberal over-use and inappropriate use of Pantone colors in artwork. Some people don't even understand the difference between a spot or process color, just like they don't understand the difference between pixels and vectors.