I admittedly don’t use photoshop or anything of the sort and I’ve only first heard of Pantone in the last day or so.
I’m seeing that they’ve put up a paywall for their colours, but I cant understand how they have a business model which is based around licensing colours? What is their business model, why are they charging for colours, why is it significant?
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Pantone color is just a standard, but it is a standard where you know if you select P244 is it the same color, no matter the machine or surface. Only change is if you want blank or mat.
I do not know why some would take money for it, but you should easily be able to find for free countless places.
Pantone colors aren’t just generic colors like red, yellow, or blue. They are very specific and standardized, which makes them useful in color dependent professions like graphic design or interior design. As a commercial architecture an interiors photographer, I have specifically asked my clients for their colors to ensure that the pictures I deliver to them are a perfect match.
The colors can be licensed because they are someone’s intellectual property. In fact, they were already being licensed to Adobe by Pantone, but Pantone got upset because Adobe wasn’t keeping these very specific colors up to date in their software.
Here’s an article from the popular photography website PetaPixel about the issue:
[https://petapixel.com/2022/10/28/you-have-to-pay-a-subscription-to-use-pantone-colors-in-photoshop-now/](https://petapixel.com/2022/10/28/you-have-to-pay-a-subscription-to-use-pantone-colors-in-photoshop-now/)
Sry that’s not an explanation but what paywall did they put up?
Pantone only makes sense in print, on screen you can only get a close estimate of what the color will look like and rgb to pantone converters are all around.
Years ago, Pantone sold a physical set of cards, much like the cards for paint colors you see at Home Depot. Same idea: If you called out a specific Pantone color (by its number), you were sure of an exact color match. We built retrofit displays for aircraft cockpits. Often our display would sit side-by-side with the competitor’s display we were replacing, so the colors of any symbol on our display had to be a darn good match with theirs, or the customer wouldn’t accept it. We’d get a competitor’s display, keep trying cards till it looked like a good match, then specify colors (by its number) to our software engineers.
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