Pantone wants $15/month for the privilege of using its colors in Photoshop

You've been paying subscription fees for years if you want to use up-to-date versions of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps. It's going to get even more expensive if you want to use Pantone colors in Adobe's apps. You will need a new extension to keep using the colors in your files after this month when the color books in Adobe's apps are mostly going away.

Once you've created an account, you can use that extension for free, but you'll need a subscription to use the full library of colors, create an unlimited color palette, and more. I was able to browse through colors using the basic version of the extension, but I had to pay for a subscription because I couldn't find most colors from most libraries.

That's an oversimplification of what Pantone does, it maintains a large library of reference colors and physical color samples used in print publishing and many design industries to ensure that colors look the way they are supposed to. If you want to see what a given color will look like when printed on a matt sheet of paper versus a glossy sheet of paper versus plastic versus cloth, you need to know that the manufacturer or printer sees the exact same color you do. Pantone colors and physical samples help to eliminate some of the confusion by showing different colors depending on how the displays are set up.

Fun times ahead for #Adobe designers. Today, if you open a PSD (even one that's 20 years old) with an obscure PANTONE colour, it will remove the colour and make it black. Pantone want US$21/month for access, and Solid Coated goes behind the paywall in early November. pic.twitter.com/BUxzViYFaQ

— Iain Anderson (@funwithstuff) October 28, 2022

The change seems to be going slowly. Some users of the software have already been warned of the change, and that the colors in old files will be replaced with black when they are opened in newer versions. The Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated libraries are going to be removed after November 2022, according to Adobe.

Adobe told Ars that they are looking at ways to reduce the impact on their customers. Customers have access to up to 14 color books through Creative Cloud.

The Solid Coated and Solid Uncoated libraries that are supposedly going away can still be accessed on an M1 MacBook Air running the most current version of the software. The current version of the extension isn't compatible with Apple Silicon and needs to be launched in the slower mode.

The wholesale removal of the old libraries from Adobe's apps was due to the fact that Adobe hadn't been updating the Pantone color libraries in its apps for more than a decade. There are conflicting dates for when the removal of the existing Pantone libraries will begin and different pricing data based on the source you're looking at. The FAQ and coverage from earlier this year lists an $8/month or $60/year subscription price for Pantone Connect, which is much lower than the prices listed on the product page.

The statement that "existing Creative Cloud files and documents containing Pantone Color references will keep those color identities and information" is contrary to the message on the Adobe website. According to Adobe's FAQ, versions of its apps released before August 2022, " will continue to have all previous Pantone Color books pre- loaded and available."

You can use Creative Cloud's "other versions" feature to install an older version of your apps that can still see and work with Pantone colors as you could before.

Adobe doesn't give older versions of its apps indefinitely. It can allow you to open and modify your files so you don't end up with blacked out colors in your images if you don't use a lot of Pantone colors. Some people have suggested copying the color libraries from the older versions of the apps and adding them to the newer versions as a way to fix the problem.

We inquired about the exact date users can expect to see the changes, whether old files will have their colors removed or whether they'll be unchanged, and whether any missing colors can be restored by installing the Pantone Connect plugin. The company didn't have anything else to say about these questions.