I’m reminded of the comedy of the Pantone swatch books being the only books that EXPIRED.
I’ve compared swatch books from 1995 to more recent ones. If you store them correctly (like you would any book, cool temperature no direct light) the swatches don’t fade. But Pantone sold so many people on the concept that you had to replace the swatch books every few years to maintain ink consistency.
I literally have memories of Art Directors treating swatch books like old milk. “This one has gone bad, buy another.” cha-ching!
It’s such bullshit. This move to blacken color on a 20 year old file is demonic.
Wait, WHAT?!?! PostScript is Abode’s own fragging product!
:: goes and googles a bit: Really… And no other reason other than “It’s an old product that modern OSs decided to stop paying us licensing fees to use supporting.”
And Adobe knows you never needed to! - Really, once History and Layers were introduced the software has been finished. I think both features were implemented two decades ago.
In the “dumb shit that forces upgrades” I can recall Apple introducing the new Retina Display mode that made all Adobe products blurry or pixelated because they weren’t up to date for that new display setting. That was pure fucking rude of Apple to do. Tons of applications had to be modified to match and if I remember correctly Adobe didn’t patch it, they just sold a new version.
Seriously though, you could do nearly everything a professional use of Photoshop needs with Photoshop 5 (not CS5, but 5, from 1998) - Everything else has been meaningless in terms of how most people use the application.
Adobe knows this. Graphic artists know this. This is why they now only sell subscription versions. And the Retina Display nonsense makes physical copies less usable. Great software but it’s all a racket.
This is indeed the bullshit of all bullshit. It is true that the names of the colors (e.g. “Pantone 718C”) are copyrighted, and Adobe can’t use them without permission. And perhaps they can’t even do what my screen-printing ink provider does, which is to have their own numbered list of color formulas and simply never mention that the numbers happen to correspond exacty to Pantone’s swatch books.
But they could at least have made it so that opening an old file replaces the spot color with a generic CMYK formula, which would let you work with it on screen. Presumably they aren’t even removing the information which is copyrighted – the original color name – since they’ll need that to restore your file if you pay the ransom. So this is Adobe actively helping their fellow rentiers as the expense of their own “customers”.
I would be interested to know if the same thing is going to happen in InDesign and Illustrator. Using spot colors in Photoshop is relatively niche (this won’t affect people who merely used a pantone color on an RGB layer), but in those other apps I think it would immediately fuck over a high proportion of users, because people use spot colors for practical reasons even when designing for screens or CMYK printing. I have a feeling this will magically only affect Photoshop, because that happens to target users who can’t work around it.
The current package installs with the full name of “GNU Image Manipulation Program,” which is a good interim step, but yeah, going to a completely new name would be good. (I note that it’s still labeled GIMP in the software manager view, though.)
i use a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop from 2003 to do just about everything i need to do. it can’t handle those newfangled .webp files, but other than that it does everything i need a photo processing program to do.
yeah. and i have thousands of T1 fonts that i have licensed over the years that starting in january will just be useless, at least in any of the thousands of jobs in which i have used them. adobe sucks. SUCKS!
Bullshit agreed. I’m vaguely remembering how this was first implemented for Adobe Illustrator. Memory is there was a file you had to buy that was effectively a digital swatch book. You’d scroll through a Pantone list and pick your swatch. I could be wrong about this but it felt very bureaucratic and separate from the color selection tool.
I recall just making everything a black panel at that time - or just switching to CMYK for everything. Black would be retained as the file I wanted to be black and if I had secondary colors I’d just make the Cyan, Magenta, or Yellow - and then print them as regular separations - printing the selected color at the printer.
There’s a chance this is still a workaround with the current issue they are forcing on people. If the color is still in a separate channel or layer, even if it visually becomes black on the screen, you should be able to indicate that plate be whatever spot color you’d want at the printer.
Cyan works wonderfully well in all layouts to indicate “this will be a spot color” in a final piece. Blue is used in mechanical processes for tons of processes.
And then they stuck the cell phone picture in a word document that protects the image from copying. Been on the receiving end of that one more that you would think possible.
It’s the colour space that matches the ink (also made by Panatone) that the printers use. Getting colours exactly right is very important for designers, and not just for abstract silly reasons.
I’ve seen 60,000 boxes tossed out at the cost of the printer because they failed to match a companies signature blue.
I get the pirated thing, but throw some support to Serif for their Affinity products-- a one time fee of about US$50 for each of their three applications. I paid less last winter during a seasonal sale. They’re really good productsand I especially appreciate how Affinity Photo (image editor/PS competitor) runs so well on my 2013 MBP. Adobe applications are just bloatware that teeter along on my old computer and, as Affinity has demonstrated, there’s no real reason for that.
I’m a big fan of the Affinity suite of apps which can do a lot of the work Adobe applications perform - but are sold as actual programs not as subscriptions. They’re a few months of Adobe subscriptions and regularly on sale.
It won’t help the people who require Pantone and other Adobe-related specifics, but for most of us who want to do digital art and design, they’re more than adequate and in many cases faster than their Adobe equivalents. There is a learning curve if you are used to Adobe interfaces and workflows, but they work just fine:
I did that for a radio station. Their hand illustrated logo had been constantly rescanned and reproduced until it had been averaged and blurred, not terrible but meh. I found some decades old event posters with large renditions of the logo and scanned those, much more lively with brush marks and other humanizing tells that give soul.
