

This has happened because most of the PMS color l ibraries – the digital equivalents of Pantone’s universally used printed color swatch books – are no longer built directly into the newest versions of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

Changes set in motion by the two companies earlier in the year are in full effect now, obliging many users to make hard choices about how they will handle their design and color quality management workflows going forward. The Adobe/Pantone synergy still exists, but achieving it has become more complicated – and more costly. When designers, prepress specialists, and printers use these industry-standard tools synergistically, they know they can count on getting predictable color output and consistently acceptable results in whatever combinations of inks and substrates they choose to work with. COLOR ME FRUSTRATED: USERS REACT TO ADOBE/PANTONE RIFT OVER PMS LIBRARIESĪs far as graphics professionals are concerned, there probably never was a more inspired pairing of technologies than Adobe’s Creative Cloud software and the Pantone Matching System (PMS) for color specification.
