[CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

[Guillermo Espertino (Gez)]

El 28/03/13 03:25, "Christoph Schäfer" escribió:

> What the downloading option in SwatchBooker does is accessing public data for an iPhone app, and what you get is RGB values which are not intended for use in professional publishing. The files made available by Adobe are spot/CMYK/RGB colours stored as L*a*b*. In other words, in terms of professional publishing, the data downloaded by SwatchBooker are toys, whereas the data made available by Adobe are "the real thing".>

I think you're wrong. The X-Ref site has the right values and apparently 
Swatchbooker downloads them properly.
It's easy to check it: Just convert any of the books to the Swatchbooker 
format and open the file with Swatchbooker Editor or with a text editor.
Formula books are stored as Lab and sRGB values, Bridge books as 
Lab+sRGB+CMYK

Swatchbooker does convert those swatches to RGB and CMYK when you save 
them as gpl or Scribus XML, but I guess that's because those palette 
formats (and the applications that support them) don't support other 
color format for their swatches.

CMYK isn't a problem since the values are kept, sRGB could of course 
clip the gamut of the original colors, but guess what: if you're working 
in sRGB space in any application and you're not using the Formula books 
as spot colors, you'll get exactly the same (the Lab colors converted to 
sRGB).

In my oppinion, the Lab values of Pantone books only matter if you're 
working in Lab Space. If you're using them as spot colors, the color is 
only used for previews and doesn't matter for print.
And if you're working in RGB and convert those spot colors to RGB, 
you'll get exactly what you get here (well, in this case you only get 
sRGB but in theory you could convert the formula books to AdobeRGB using 
swatchbooker too).

As I said above, the CMYK values aren't a problem.
If you're using an application that supports CMYK, like Scribus, you 
should be using the Bridge books, not the Formula books. And in that 
case the program will use the exact CMYK values from the swatch.
Swatchbooker gets those CMYK values straight from the Bridge books from 
X-Ref, and the values are RIGHT in the resulting palette.

I can't see why this isn't suitable for professional publishing and why 
you say the values obtained by Swatchbooker are just "toys".

And more importantly, you won't get anything better using the files you 
linked. It's exactly the same. If you're working in RGB, the Lab values 
from Formula will get converted to your RGB space, no matter what 
program you use (libre or not). If you're working in CMYK, the Formula 
guides have no use (unless you're using them for spot plates) and the 
CMYK values from the bridge guide will be used.

> Moreover, consider yourself lucky that Pantone hasn't unleashed an army of lawyers on you yet ;) Maybe this is due to your jurisdiction, but it is unthinkable that Pantone wouldn't object to the distribution of their digital colour palettes without a proper licence agreement. The web is full of sites that used to list Pantone colours but were forced to remove them after Pantone threatened legal action. Whether we like it or not (in terms of results), Pantone is just as entitled to use copyright and trademark protection for their purposes as are Free Software and Open Content projects. If we don't respect the rights of others, we lose the moral rights to enforce our own Free and Open licenses. It could also seal doors that are currently closed, but may be opened in the future (think of IBM, for instance): "Constant dripping wears away the stone."

First of all, I'm legally entitled to use Pantone swatches with my 
software since I bought them their books, which include software and 
swatches in digital format.
However, they don't provide a suitable format for the software I use, so 
I have to find a way to "convert" their swatches to a format I can use 
(they offer some EPS files in the CD that comes with the books for cases 
like mine. Conversion is contemplated).
They also made their swatches publicly available from their X-Ref 
website, and when I visit their site to check the values my browser does 
exactly the same that swatchbooker does, it queries their database and 
picks the data up from it.
For convenience, instead of visiting the site everytime I need one of 
those values I use swatchbooker to get those values and save them in a file.
There's no practical difference between doing that and picking a pen and 
a piece of paper and copy the values I need.

I can't see how their lawyers would waste time and resources trying to
catch a paying customer that just uses a script to access the data the 
company already entitled him to get.
And if they do, all they'd get is one less paying customer, because I'd 
not only stop buying their books for good, but I'd also ask my money 
back because I can't use the tool I paid for.

Swatchbooker has been out for a couple of years (including the feature 
for downloading the swatches from Pantone's site) and Pantone lawyers 
haven't said anything about it.
It would be a stupid move if they do. They don't offer any support for 
Libre software, so a tool like Swatchbooker doesn't harm them. Actually, 
it helps them selling more guides to some free software users that 
wouldn't buy them if they couldn't use them in libre software.


Gez.