Starting in November, graphic designers who want to use a Pantone color selection within Photoshop, Illustrator, and other Adobe Creative Suite applications will need to pay a monthly subscription. Until a few months ago, access to the color collections of the American brand for use on Photoshop was free and already integrated into the software, but things have changed with the latest update of the suite and the introduction of a new extension called Pantone Connect.
How much does it cost to color
The additional software is free to download, but you need to activate a license in order to apply a Pantone color to your work. There is not much clarity on the price: the extension page talks about 90 dollars a year, Pantone on its website says that there are only 60. In both cases the figure is added to the already high subscription for the use of the Creative Suite.
The change is retroactive: opening an old Photoshop file that contains a Pantone taken from the old free libraries, the software returns a warning and replaces all instances of the color with black. To solve the problem at the moment users have only two options, and that is to pay the new subscription, or to install an older version of the program in which the old libraries are still present.
Chromatic differences
Pantone explained that Adobe had no longer updated the built-in libraries since 2011 and that the new extension was necessary to be able to integrate hundreds of new colors created since then. In un tweetHowever, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky revealed that it was Pantone who asked not to renew the license and to remove the catalogs in order to sell access to end users via the plugin.
For Pantone it is an unexpected change of strategy. Up to now, most of the company’s revenues have always come from the sale of “color books”, from brand merchandising and above all from promotional and licensing agreements with large companies.
The properties of colors
But how is it possible that a single company can “own” colors and ask for a donation to use them? The matter is more complex than that: Pantone does not limit itself to coding and cataloging colors, but offers professionals a globally recognized reference system. Using a Pantone tone means being sure that that color will always appear the same on the glossy page of a magazine as on a t-shirt printed in China, on the packaging of a product sold in Italy as on a billboard in the United States. Pantone also offers a proximity reference of colors in the RGB and CMYK spaces, used by digital graphics respectively for display reproduction and for jobs intended for printing.
Chromatic sovereignty
Therefore, Pantone does not have the colors of its libraries, but defines them according to a globally recognized standard system. For this reason, according to the British artist Stuart Semple, the choice to charge a subscription to access the chromatic collections is equivalent to “keeping the colors hostage”. Semple has recently created an alternative library to those of Pantone, provocatively called Freetone: graphic designers can download it freely and the result is very similar (technically indistinguishable) from what is obtained using the analogous colors of the Pantone catalog.
The artist is not new to such actions of chromatic activism. In 2016 the sculptor Anish Kapoor acquired the exclusive rights to use Vantablack for artistic purposes, the blackest pigment ever, capable of almost totally absorbing light. He simply did not limit himself to criticizing his colleague, but launched a real crusade to oppose what we could define a chromatic sovereignty. His company Creative Hustle today produces Black 3.0, a black comparable in characteristics to the Vantablack. The license for use provides that everyone can buy and use it, with the exception of Anish Kapoor.
International Klein Blue
Unlike the case of Yves Klein and the famous International Klein Blue (IKB), an intense and uniform ultramarine blue that plays a central role in many of the French painter’s works. Contrary to popular belief, Klein never patented color, but in 1960 only registered the paint formula he invented with the French national intellectual property body. Dozens of artists of all levels have used it and will use it in their works, without anyone being able to ask them to pay a subscription to do so.