Pantone & Adobe vs. Stuart Semple: Veteran of the Colour Wars
October 30, 2022 8:55 PM Subscribe
In December of 2021, professionals in the print and design industries were disappointed to learn that because of a breakdown in licensing talks, Adobe would remove Pantone Color Libraries from future versions of its Creative Cloud products. The reality turned out to be more disappointingly late-stage-capitalist-rent-seeking, when Adobe decided that any Photoshop file with a Pantone color would be replaced by black squares when the PSD file was loaded, unless the user pays an additional $21 per month.
The last time I checked in on Stuart Semple, he had thrown down a gauntlet on Anish Kapoor, protesting the exclusive license to use VantaBlack ("the blackest black") Kapoor had been by the manufacturer. Since then, he also thumbed his nose last year at Tiffany & Co., who since 1998 have claimed an exclusive right to their robin's-egg blue hue (which is licensed as Pantone PMS number 1837, incidentally) by selling a well-matched high grade matte acrylic blue paint called TIFF. Last month, he released a red-paint collection infused with the blood of gay men as a protest of the FDA's continuing restrictions on gay men donating blood in the midst of a nationwide blood shortage, with the proceeds going to a health center.
In response to Adobe & Pantone, Semple released FREETONE: "1280 Liberated colours are extremely Pantoneish and reminiscent of those found in the most iconic colour book of all time" along with video instructions on how to make the swatches part of your new Illustrator or Photoshop workflow. He's giving it away gratis, with the sole restriction that "you confirm that you are not an employee of Adobe or Pantone, nor are you associated with Adobe or Pantone, and to the best of your knowledge information and belief this palette will not make its way into the hands of anyone at Adobe or Pantone." The situation is still developing, Pantone's reaction, or this whole sad affair's effect on use of Adobe software, remains to be seen.
For people who work in prepress, a key part of their Adobe tools is integration with Pantone. Pantone is a system for specifying color-matching. A Pantone number corresponds to a specific tint that's either made by mixing the four standard print colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, AKA "CMYK"), or by applying a "spot" color.To Cory Doctorow, this was an entirely foreseeable outcome of Adobe transitioning their product into the "Creative Cloud" software-as-a-service, with Pantone wanting their cut of Adobe's license money stream, stranding all their users without the ability to "roll back" to an earlier version. But wait! Is there a hero riding out to wage chromatic combat?
The last time I checked in on Stuart Semple, he had thrown down a gauntlet on Anish Kapoor, protesting the exclusive license to use VantaBlack ("the blackest black") Kapoor had been by the manufacturer. Since then, he also thumbed his nose last year at Tiffany & Co., who since 1998 have claimed an exclusive right to their robin's-egg blue hue (which is licensed as Pantone PMS number 1837, incidentally) by selling a well-matched high grade matte acrylic blue paint called TIFF. Last month, he released a red-paint collection infused with the blood of gay men as a protest of the FDA's continuing restrictions on gay men donating blood in the midst of a nationwide blood shortage, with the proceeds going to a health center.
In response to Adobe & Pantone, Semple released FREETONE: "1280 Liberated colours are extremely Pantoneish and reminiscent of those found in the most iconic colour book of all time" along with video instructions on how to make the swatches part of your new Illustrator or Photoshop workflow. He's giving it away gratis, with the sole restriction that "you confirm that you are not an employee of Adobe or Pantone, nor are you associated with Adobe or Pantone, and to the best of your knowledge information and belief this palette will not make its way into the hands of anyone at Adobe or Pantone." The situation is still developing, Pantone's reaction, or this whole sad affair's effect on use of Adobe software, remains to be seen.
But also: Watch out for the Tone police!
posted by amtho at 9:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by amtho at 9:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [22 favorites]
This is, on Pantone's part, a bit like deciding that because too many people are browsing your catalogue without buying anything, to start charging to look at the catalogue.
posted by Pyry at 9:22 PM on October 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 9:22 PM on October 30, 2022 [13 favorites]
Pantone is making the mistake of thinking that because they’re such an integral part of the print process now that they always will be. Ask IBM how that worked out with computers. Interoperability will always win in the end.
posted by Bottlecap at 9:27 PM on October 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by Bottlecap at 9:27 PM on October 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
Yeah, this is going to turn out to be a huge mistake by Adobe and Pantone. (On a lighter note, it looks like a lot of the ads that come in camera ready at work are suddenly gonna have all the spot colors in the files fixed.) There’s a lot of ways around this, and if you’re not a big brand, agency or prepress house, you are almost certainly not going to pay the $21 a month. Even if you’re a prepress house, you can work around it as long as you can change the spot color to a non-book color. I’m not going to say that Pantone just wrote their own obituary, but they’re about to find out just how relevant they really are, and it’s not as much as they think.
posted by azpenguin at 9:46 PM on October 30, 2022 [15 favorites]
posted by azpenguin at 9:46 PM on October 30, 2022 [15 favorites]
I was a long-time Photoshop user until recently, I recommend Affinity Photo. It's basically Photoshop, but to own a copy forever costs the same as just a month's rent of Photoshop. (It's also frequently on sale).
The caveat is (was) that it doesn't have some of the fringe things such as expensive pre-press licensed stuff like Pantone ...but now neither does Photoshop so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It reads and writes Photoshop files, it is compatible with Photoshop plug-ins, etc. It seems designed to be a drop-in replacement for Photoshop to outcompete Adobe for Adobe's own users. (To that end Affinity similarly offers replacements for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign.) I have no association with the company, I recommend because the value has been so high it feels like I cheated somehow (and I think Adobe could do with more competition)
posted by Cusp at 9:47 PM on October 30, 2022 [51 favorites]
The caveat is (was) that it doesn't have some of the fringe things such as expensive pre-press licensed stuff like Pantone ...but now neither does Photoshop so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It reads and writes Photoshop files, it is compatible with Photoshop plug-ins, etc. It seems designed to be a drop-in replacement for Photoshop to outcompete Adobe for Adobe's own users. (To that end Affinity similarly offers replacements for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign.) I have no association with the company, I recommend because the value has been so high it feels like I cheated somehow (and I think Adobe could do with more competition)
posted by Cusp at 9:47 PM on October 30, 2022 [51 favorites]
I adore Affinity Designer, but I never found Affinity Photo to be nearly as easy to get good results as PhotoShop when doing actual photography workflow stuff. For random manipulation and stuff, though, sure.
posted by aubilenon at 10:11 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 10:11 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Yeah, I own a copy of Affinity Photo and I haven't found it to be a "drop-in replacement" for Photoshop in any way, shape or form. Maybe I just didn't find the "pretend this program works exactly like Photoshop" mode, but the workflow is completely different and I felt like I was constantly looking up how to do even basic tasks. Hotkeys didn't always do what I expected them to, features would be stuck in panels I didn't know about, etc.
That said, it's certainly competitive in terms of functionality, and I think for most people Affinity Photo is probably more than good enough. The effort of retraining old habits (assuming you have them) is potentially worth the money you'd spend on a monthly subscription.
Back to the Pantone stuff: isn't this one of those things that's going to be really hard to undo because everyone in the industry has standardized around Pantone? Like, it'd be great if Freetone took off to punish Adobe and Pantone's rent-seeking, but isn't the whole benefit of a colour matching system that it is a standard you can use pretty much everywhere and everyone will be able to interpret your files the way you expect them to? What happens if you send a file that uses Freetone and the printers don't know what the hell to do with it? (This is a genuine question. Like, do print shops mix the spot colours themselves from CMYK/whatever basic pigments are commonly used? If so, then it sounds like adopting Freetone wouldn't be as much of a problem, but if the spot pigments can't be mixed by a print shop themselves, where would they get Freetone pigments from?)
posted by chrominance at 10:28 PM on October 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
That said, it's certainly competitive in terms of functionality, and I think for most people Affinity Photo is probably more than good enough. The effort of retraining old habits (assuming you have them) is potentially worth the money you'd spend on a monthly subscription.
Back to the Pantone stuff: isn't this one of those things that's going to be really hard to undo because everyone in the industry has standardized around Pantone? Like, it'd be great if Freetone took off to punish Adobe and Pantone's rent-seeking, but isn't the whole benefit of a colour matching system that it is a standard you can use pretty much everywhere and everyone will be able to interpret your files the way you expect them to? What happens if you send a file that uses Freetone and the printers don't know what the hell to do with it? (This is a genuine question. Like, do print shops mix the spot colours themselves from CMYK/whatever basic pigments are commonly used? If so, then it sounds like adopting Freetone wouldn't be as much of a problem, but if the spot pigments can't be mixed by a print shop themselves, where would they get Freetone pigments from?)
posted by chrominance at 10:28 PM on October 30, 2022 [4 favorites]
You can't tone your pants without Pant-tone.
posted by Termite at 11:13 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Termite at 11:13 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
You don't necessarily need to switch to a new color matching system as long as you can add in your print files your desired spot color(s) with instructions to the print shop that your named color "Definitely Not Pantone Color #1234" matches up to "Pantone #1234". They'll work their magic from there.
[That's not to say it has no drawbacks or it's something you'd always want to do, just that it can be done and often is out of necessity anyway]
posted by UN at 11:24 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
[That's not to say it has no drawbacks or it's something you'd always want to do, just that it can be done and often is out of necessity anyway]
posted by UN at 11:24 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
Photopea is a pretty darn amazing stand-in for Photoshop that runs in a browser. I am a looong time daily user of Photoshop and I am blown away by how good Photopea is compared to Photoshop.
posted by bz at 11:33 PM on October 30, 2022 [23 favorites]
posted by bz at 11:33 PM on October 30, 2022 [23 favorites]
No Apple Silicon version, less gamut than reality. Lame.
Seriously, they optimized for online checkout before functionality.
I will tap dance and urinate on Pantone and Adobe’s graves, respectively.
posted by monster free city at 3:26 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Seriously, they optimized for online checkout before functionality.
I will tap dance and urinate on Pantone and Adobe’s graves, respectively.
posted by monster free city at 3:26 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
In other words, those in Adobe houses couldn't show tones.
(Actually, my pre-coffee brain initially read this as "Pantene" and was trying to come up with a good pun about adobe houses -- the clay/sand ones -- and shampoo. But it didn't stick.)
posted by basalganglia at 4:00 AM on October 31, 2022 [16 favorites]
(Actually, my pre-coffee brain initially read this as "Pantene" and was trying to come up with a good pun about adobe houses -- the clay/sand ones -- and shampoo. But it didn't stick.)
posted by basalganglia at 4:00 AM on October 31, 2022 [16 favorites]
Pantone and the color wars
I can’t take this anymore
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:47 AM on October 31, 2022 [16 favorites]
I can’t take this anymore
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:47 AM on October 31, 2022 [16 favorites]
This is why monopolies suck. I used to work in prepress and can remember the CMYK equivalents for certain Pantone colors (I think the most popular red was 0/90/90/0, for example). But they weren't content with selling color wheels and licensing their system to the software companies -- NO, THEY NEEDED MORE.
For decades, every lawyer in America bought law books using content from West Publishing. They had created a system for recording and numbering cases, which became the defacto "Dewey decimal system" for pretty much all American law.
West was sued several times over profiting from public domain data that they copyrighted...but AFAIR they didn't actually lose. But then the owners sold out to a big company, Thompson Reuters, and they were slowly digested in the belly of the conglomerate until they became just another division.
Their system is still used, though.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:36 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
For decades, every lawyer in America bought law books using content from West Publishing. They had created a system for recording and numbering cases, which became the defacto "Dewey decimal system" for pretty much all American law.
West was sued several times over profiting from public domain data that they copyrighted...but AFAIR they didn't actually lose. But then the owners sold out to a big company, Thompson Reuters, and they were slowly digested in the belly of the conglomerate until they became just another division.
Their system is still used, though.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:36 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Ugh.
I use Acrobat on a nigh-daily basis for forms work. Photoshop occasionally, Illustrator I rely on heavily for a short time each year. And once in a great while I break out Lightroom to fiddle with some photos from our older DSLR.
Not sure why every company involved is so goddamn hell-bent on ensuring that this kind of usage is utterly unaffordable. If the software wasn’t paid for by my employer there’s no way in hell I would ever keep shelling out for it.
Remember the old days when you could pay for the software you actually used, and use it as long as you wanted? The whole “but it comes with everything we make!” argument is only a reasonable one if I use everything they make. I barely use a few of the apps. They’re so greedy that they are throwing away the possibility of selling less to more people. Imagine how many people would actually pay for Photoshop - just Photoshop - if you could pick it up for $5 a month. But no, that won’t make the shareholders happy, let’s jack it up to a ridiculous monthly fee and just soak the poor bastards who need it to do their jobs.
Even though work pays for it I keep eyeballing Affinity. My boss would likely be happy to pay for that as an alternative.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:42 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
I use Acrobat on a nigh-daily basis for forms work. Photoshop occasionally, Illustrator I rely on heavily for a short time each year. And once in a great while I break out Lightroom to fiddle with some photos from our older DSLR.
Not sure why every company involved is so goddamn hell-bent on ensuring that this kind of usage is utterly unaffordable. If the software wasn’t paid for by my employer there’s no way in hell I would ever keep shelling out for it.
Remember the old days when you could pay for the software you actually used, and use it as long as you wanted? The whole “but it comes with everything we make!” argument is only a reasonable one if I use everything they make. I barely use a few of the apps. They’re so greedy that they are throwing away the possibility of selling less to more people. Imagine how many people would actually pay for Photoshop - just Photoshop - if you could pick it up for $5 a month. But no, that won’t make the shareholders happy, let’s jack it up to a ridiculous monthly fee and just soak the poor bastards who need it to do their jobs.
Even though work pays for it I keep eyeballing Affinity. My boss would likely be happy to pay for that as an alternative.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:42 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Viva Stuart Semple!
Pixlr E is also a great, free, browser-based Photoshop replacement for the casual user. I've been using it almost daily for years -- it's a hell of a lot quicker to boot up than Creative Cloud.
posted by ourobouros at 5:45 AM on October 31, 2022 [10 favorites]
Pixlr E is also a great, free, browser-based Photoshop replacement for the casual user. I've been using it almost daily for years -- it's a hell of a lot quicker to boot up than Creative Cloud.
posted by ourobouros at 5:45 AM on October 31, 2022 [10 favorites]
What stops the Photopea and Pixlr E creators from charging for their software tomorrow? How do they let you escape the basic problem of not being able to buy and own software?
posted by AlSweigart at 5:55 AM on October 31, 2022
posted by AlSweigart at 5:55 AM on October 31, 2022
Alternative software that is browser based is a no go for anyone who doesn't want a duplicate of Thier files on a random server they don't control and don't know the usage eula for.
I don't want to give just anyone else access to my file system nor my photos - irrespective of what the photos are of.
posted by Faintdreams at 6:10 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I don't want to give just anyone else access to my file system nor my photos - irrespective of what the photos are of.
posted by Faintdreams at 6:10 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm gonna let y'all in on a little secret...Pantone is owned by Danaher Corporation - who in turn own another DAM (Digital Asset Management application) MediaBeacon
Adobe keeps "acquiring" smaller competing DAMs into their industry dominant AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) which has native integrations to most of Adobe's offerings IE Workfront, Illustrator, & Photoshop.
Pantone/Danaher (the largest company you've never heard of) is playing hardball with Adobe.
posted by djseafood at 6:26 AM on October 31, 2022 [11 favorites]
Adobe keeps "acquiring" smaller competing DAMs into their industry dominant AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) which has native integrations to most of Adobe's offerings IE Workfront, Illustrator, & Photoshop.
Pantone/Danaher (the largest company you've never heard of) is playing hardball with Adobe.
posted by djseafood at 6:26 AM on October 31, 2022 [11 favorites]
What stops the Photopea and Pixlr E creators from charging for their software tomorrow? How do they let you escape the basic problem of not being able to buy and own software?
Short of buying non-networked software and never ever updating it or the OS it runs on you’re never going to own software for any length of time.
To give a concrete example I shipped a small game midway through the release cycle of iOS 5. A year later iOS 6 came out and a tiny change to a system font made the game totally unusable. Fortunately it only sold a few copies but … that’s the reality of software. It rots, quickly.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:37 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Short of buying non-networked software and never ever updating it or the OS it runs on you’re never going to own software for any length of time.
To give a concrete example I shipped a small game midway through the release cycle of iOS 5. A year later iOS 6 came out and a tiny change to a system font made the game totally unusable. Fortunately it only sold a few copies but … that’s the reality of software. It rots, quickly.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:37 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
25+ years ago, the company I worked for started working with Acrobat, back when it was a new thing. I had the developer kit, and access to their tech forums and all that stuff. They were really good at "you can do this to save money," and then discontinuing that program, because customers were using it to save money.
I still hate them.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:39 AM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
I still hate them.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:39 AM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
If I was still doing prepress I'd be elated by this. Younger designers don't understand spot colors anyway. Pantone is just a color picker to them.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:42 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:42 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Pantone may be playing hardball, but they won't win.
Adobe has a global monopoly in desktop publishing. Pantone has a partial monopoly: their color system may be the default in America, but certainly not in Europe — which is a very large market. A competitor is standard for large and small German corporate brands, for example.
Adobe is telling Pantone: 'fine, you can charge for your color codes, but then you have the pleasure of writing your own plugin and releasing it on our platform. And we get a cut of every sale now, thanks!'
So now Pantone has damaged its reputation as a de-facto industry standard. Printers and designers have to deal with these faulty files. Unless, of course, they're using a competing color standard. Oops.
posted by UN at 6:54 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
Adobe has a global monopoly in desktop publishing. Pantone has a partial monopoly: their color system may be the default in America, but certainly not in Europe — which is a very large market. A competitor is standard for large and small German corporate brands, for example.
Adobe is telling Pantone: 'fine, you can charge for your color codes, but then you have the pleasure of writing your own plugin and releasing it on our platform. And we get a cut of every sale now, thanks!'
So now Pantone has damaged its reputation as a de-facto industry standard. Printers and designers have to deal with these faulty files. Unless, of course, they're using a competing color standard. Oops.
posted by UN at 6:54 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
Pantone/Danaher (the largest company you've never heard of) is playing hardball with Adobe.
Danaher also owns X-rite and Esko so they've got more than a few fingers in the print media pie. Ironically Esko's rips are really good at normalizing badly named/formed spot colors so anyone using a Danaher-family-product will be able to automate normalizing all the goofy swatch names and definitions back into the official book.
If you want to keep using the color books from your current Adobe apps going forward make a backup of your color book files (*.acb). The color books are in the same folder as the application in a folder named "Presets" (exact location within that folder can vary between different applications because Adobe gonna Adobe). Copy them into the corresponding folder of the newer app and they should just work — obviously you won't get any newer colors but at least your old files won't break.
posted by nathan_teske at 9:59 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
Danaher also owns X-rite and Esko so they've got more than a few fingers in the print media pie. Ironically Esko's rips are really good at normalizing badly named/formed spot colors so anyone using a Danaher-family-product will be able to automate normalizing all the goofy swatch names and definitions back into the official book.
If you want to keep using the color books from your current Adobe apps going forward make a backup of your color book files (*.acb). The color books are in the same folder as the application in a folder named "Presets" (exact location within that folder can vary between different applications because Adobe gonna Adobe). Copy them into the corresponding folder of the newer app and they should just work — obviously you won't get any newer colors but at least your old files won't break.
posted by nathan_teske at 9:59 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
I'm out of my depth here, and I'd really love to know enough to be able to snark intelligently about this, so can someone help me out with what "newer colors" means?
posted by Wood at 10:52 AM on October 31, 2022
posted by Wood at 10:52 AM on October 31, 2022
Wood -- Pantone adds a number of colors to their color matching system every year. With their subscription service you'll get swatch definitions for those new colors but, if you're using the libraries from an older version of Adobe Creative Cloud, you'll only have the colors that shipped with that version of the application.
posted by nathan_teske at 10:57 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by nathan_teske at 10:57 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Coming up with new colors every year seems ripe for crowdsourcing. Also, seems like one of those monopolies that people put up with as long as they stay in their lane. Maybe Crayola will take a swing at it... "from the school room to the board room, inside the lines, or outside the box, Crayola has you covered".
posted by Wood at 11:03 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Wood at 11:03 AM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
I would imagine Pantone is already in terminal decline. So much stuff is web or print on demand, I just can’t imagine there are so many companies doing print marketing collateral that really needs spot color of Intel or Hamlindigo blue. When I get a reference letter from my bank, they just print it on a black and white laser printer. Seems like a perfect time for people to develop cool color palettes for print and web that could be used in a variety of software.
posted by snofoam at 11:22 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by snofoam at 11:22 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Oh the "finding" new colors bit is comparatively easy. What Pantone is good at is providing a library of colors and printed swatch books that are accurate to within a fraction of a percent of the standard. It's like if you were learning a new language -- super helpful to both have the printed word and a pronunciation.
posted by nathan_teske at 11:27 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by nathan_teske at 11:27 AM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
Tell Me No Lies: "that’s the reality of software. It rots, quickly."
That's why all of my videogames are written in plain text!
(but seriously, Twine games are fun)
posted by mecran01 at 11:41 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
That's why all of my videogames are written in plain text!
(but seriously, Twine games are fun)
posted by mecran01 at 11:41 AM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
I wonder if this new feud will generate any good Semple vs. someone else fanfic like the one with Kapoor did.
On a more serious note, when I read about this last night, I got a sick feeling in my gut. I've managed to just squeak by with Acrobat by finding nonsubscription copies that they don't want you to know still exist, but I think the most recent version might be the last and when that's no longer functional in the neverending forced obsolescence cycle with Apple and Adobe, I won't be able to work on my lil niche music magazine anymore. Though, they may not be functioning all that well themselves, since there's no way they'll be able to afford an extra $21/mo when they're just struggling along. The publisher tries hard to be very law-abiding, but this might be the thing that breaks him down. The selling point has always been the photography--this whole thing really sucks.
The fact that Adobe won't understand that so many creative people simply can't afford subscriptions is what's going to kill them. There's no pricing for "poor freelancer who just gets by" or "tiny niche business" and that's still a huge part of their user base.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:57 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
On a more serious note, when I read about this last night, I got a sick feeling in my gut. I've managed to just squeak by with Acrobat by finding nonsubscription copies that they don't want you to know still exist, but I think the most recent version might be the last and when that's no longer functional in the neverending forced obsolescence cycle with Apple and Adobe, I won't be able to work on my lil niche music magazine anymore. Though, they may not be functioning all that well themselves, since there's no way they'll be able to afford an extra $21/mo when they're just struggling along. The publisher tries hard to be very law-abiding, but this might be the thing that breaks him down. The selling point has always been the photography--this whole thing really sucks.
The fact that Adobe won't understand that so many creative people simply can't afford subscriptions is what's going to kill them. There's no pricing for "poor freelancer who just gets by" or "tiny niche business" and that's still a huge part of their user base.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:57 AM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
"What stops the Photopea and Pixlr E creators from charging for their software tomorrow? How do they let you escape the basic problem of not being able to buy and own software?"
Photopea has a $3/mo tier and made almost $30 Million last year. A somewhat sensational account of Photopea's success, from the 5to9: Photopea: The Free Photoshop Alternative Making Millions
posted by bz at 12:00 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Photopea has a $3/mo tier and made almost $30 Million last year. A somewhat sensational account of Photopea's success, from the 5to9: Photopea: The Free Photoshop Alternative Making Millions
posted by bz at 12:00 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
> that’s the reality of software. It rots, quickly.
It doesn't, really. Various entities involved prefer to churn dependencies which means it won't work on newer versions of the same platform. There are stable platforms. If you only use what is specified in Common Lisp, your code has a lifetime in decades without changes. But there are very few entities in the software world for whom long term support is economically desirable. JVM bytecode from twenty years ago still runs just fine.
It used to be that the mass of Win32 software was so big that it forced Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility, but they finally managed to claw their way out of that.
As for Adobe, their key problem is that they finished their software. There was no particular reason for the vast majority of people to upgrade Photoshop or Illustrator. With perpetual licenses, that means the only time they could get revenue was when the operating system vendors churned the underlying platform. Capitalism and market forces don't know what to do with finished software except turn it into software-as-a-service.
posted by madhadron at 2:37 PM on October 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
It doesn't, really. Various entities involved prefer to churn dependencies which means it won't work on newer versions of the same platform. There are stable platforms. If you only use what is specified in Common Lisp, your code has a lifetime in decades without changes. But there are very few entities in the software world for whom long term support is economically desirable. JVM bytecode from twenty years ago still runs just fine.
It used to be that the mass of Win32 software was so big that it forced Microsoft to maintain backwards compatibility, but they finally managed to claw their way out of that.
As for Adobe, their key problem is that they finished their software. There was no particular reason for the vast majority of people to upgrade Photoshop or Illustrator. With perpetual licenses, that means the only time they could get revenue was when the operating system vendors churned the underlying platform. Capitalism and market forces don't know what to do with finished software except turn it into software-as-a-service.
posted by madhadron at 2:37 PM on October 31, 2022 [6 favorites]
I don’t really use spot colors (I was looking into it a while back for some projects but my small business is small enough that I just could NOT justify the extra expense for printing, and honestly I’m still sad about it, process colors are so limited!), but I’ve been using photoshop for well over half my life now and it surprises me sometimes to realize that. It bums me out that I started out on pirated copies as a teenager, and because I was able to access those/they existed, they now have a paying customer for life. And I just want that for more kids. I taught photoshop classes for a while and part of my motivation was to let kids have access via the class to just mess around with it for hours like I used to. It’s just exhausting that every damn thing is a subscription, and parceling out functionality like this is just one more piece of that system taking over our whole lives.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 5:52 PM on October 31, 2022
posted by jeweled accumulation at 5:52 PM on October 31, 2022
Re: finished software, the AI/“content aware fill”-type tools have greatly improved over the last 5 years, even, and I would absolutely periodically pay for upgrades for that. Capture One seems to do like a cheaper major version and then you get a couple upgrades, and then eventually you’ll need to either stick with the older version or upgrade again, and that feels reasonable to me, who’s using it daily as a work tool, so I WILL upgrade to keep current.
Edited to clarify that by “cheaper” I mean much less than the $600 or whatever that Photoshop used to cost.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 5:56 PM on October 31, 2022
Edited to clarify that by “cheaper” I mean much less than the $600 or whatever that Photoshop used to cost.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 5:56 PM on October 31, 2022
This may be of tangential interest: Configure GIMP 2.10 To Use Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts (How-To)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:09 PM on October 31, 2022
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:09 PM on October 31, 2022
Using Pantone Process colors is a pretty sweet workflow for print but really only involves owning a printed (and cared for) swatch book. You pick your colors from the book (presumably matching something in the real world) and can ignore what they look like on the screen. The Pantone Process libs in the Adobe apps were just handy shortcuts for making the connection. So that workflow isn't really broken by this change. It's users in workflows with the solids that got potentially screwed here.
However, in my limited experience with such things, if you're specifying the solids there's usually a customer on the other end with real budget (i.e. the printing will be more expensive w/ the solids) and that's more than going to cover the cost of having to now pay for the hook-up the libraries provide in the Adobe apps.
So while this sucks and represents a shitty cash grab, possibly by both parties, I'm not sure it's quite the disaster some are making it out to be.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:26 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
However, in my limited experience with such things, if you're specifying the solids there's usually a customer on the other end with real budget (i.e. the printing will be more expensive w/ the solids) and that's more than going to cover the cost of having to now pay for the hook-up the libraries provide in the Adobe apps.
So while this sucks and represents a shitty cash grab, possibly by both parties, I'm not sure it's quite the disaster some are making it out to be.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:26 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Various entities involved prefer to churn dependencies which means it won't work on newer versions of the same platform.
Yes, that is exactly the mechanism by which software rots. A little bit of it becomes useless every time someone changes the environment around it, leading it to be more and more crippled until one day it just doesn't work anymore.
I can not think of any general computing platform that doesn't suffer from that. Bytecode (or for that matter assembly code) from many years ago is still valid code, but that doesn't mean it will run in any useful sense.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:40 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yes, that is exactly the mechanism by which software rots. A little bit of it becomes useless every time someone changes the environment around it, leading it to be more and more crippled until one day it just doesn't work anymore.
I can not think of any general computing platform that doesn't suffer from that. Bytecode (or for that matter assembly code) from many years ago is still valid code, but that doesn't mean it will run in any useful sense.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:40 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
Every print shop I worked at had one or more old computers dedicated to run old software that some customer still used. I'm sure if you ask around you can still find places that will accept Brøderbund PrintShop files. (If you know what you are doing, it works fine for two or three spot color jobs.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:05 PM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:05 PM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
Imagine how many people would actually pay for Photoshop - just Photoshop - if you could pick it up for $5 a month
Photoshop as a standalone subscription is only $9.99 a month. It's not $5, sure, but it's still pretty affordable. They make the individual subscriptions kinda hard to find on the website, but it's there if you keep scrolling (they hide the scroll bar so it doesn't look like there's more below).
posted by ananci at 2:20 AM on November 1, 2022
Photoshop as a standalone subscription is only $9.99 a month. It's not $5, sure, but it's still pretty affordable. They make the individual subscriptions kinda hard to find on the website, but it's there if you keep scrolling (they hide the scroll bar so it doesn't look like there's more below).
posted by ananci at 2:20 AM on November 1, 2022
Is pricing for Adobe products dramatically different in the US? I checked here in Europe and standalone Photoshop is €35.69 per month, which is roughly equivalent to 36 dollars/month.
posted by UN at 2:38 AM on November 1, 2022
posted by UN at 2:38 AM on November 1, 2022
All I can find (US pricing) says $20.99 a month for photoshop on its own, or $19.99 if you don’t mind also getting Lightroom.
posted by aubilenon at 3:26 AM on November 1, 2022
posted by aubilenon at 3:26 AM on November 1, 2022
$20.99 a month for photoshop on its own, or $19.99 if you don’t mind also getting Lightroom.
Even Adobe values Lightroom in negative dollars?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:22 AM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Even Adobe values Lightroom in negative dollars?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:22 AM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
"$20.99 a month for photoshop on its own, or $19.99 if you don’t mind also getting Lightroom.
Even Adobe values Lightroom in negative dollars?"
No, the Photoshop subscription contains things not in the Photoshop/Lightroom subscription.
posted by jonathanhughes at 2:09 PM on November 1, 2022
Even Adobe values Lightroom in negative dollars?"
No, the Photoshop subscription contains things not in the Photoshop/Lightroom subscription.
posted by jonathanhughes at 2:09 PM on November 1, 2022
aubilenon: "All I can find (US pricing) says $20.99 a month for photoshop on its own, or $19.99 if you don’t mind also getting Lightroom."
Which is great unless you also use Illustrator. Which I do.
It's really really frustrating that the old Creative Suite Design Standard (Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) could be purchased for $200, academic price, perpetual license - and now the BASE price for an academic license that includes the same programs is $240 (for the first year, $360 afterwards). Which means if you use it for only 2 years, you are paying $600 - three times what you would have with the perpetual license. I'm sure some mid-level executive got a nice bonus out of proposing that pricing, sure hope the cost of their soul was worth it?
posted by caution live frogs at 2:47 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Which is great unless you also use Illustrator. Which I do.
It's really really frustrating that the old Creative Suite Design Standard (Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator) could be purchased for $200, academic price, perpetual license - and now the BASE price for an academic license that includes the same programs is $240 (for the first year, $360 afterwards). Which means if you use it for only 2 years, you are paying $600 - three times what you would have with the perpetual license. I'm sure some mid-level executive got a nice bonus out of proposing that pricing, sure hope the cost of their soul was worth it?
posted by caution live frogs at 2:47 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
« Older A Night of Halloweens | Ooh do you fink u r Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by amtho at 9:14 PM on October 30, 2022 [10 favorites]