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

[Gregory Pittman]

On 03/28/2013 02:42 PM, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:
> 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).
>
>
If you are using Pantone as a spot color, the CMYK, the RGB, the Lab 
doesn't matter, since you are specifying a Pantone ink. What you might 
have your printer do theoretically is emulate a Pantone ink strictly as 
a cost-saving measure.
>> 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.
I don't think we really know the boundaries of what Pantone might 
complain about. It may well be that in your case they would not want to 
upset a customer, but I think it's appropriate to warn others to 
consider what they're doing and be careful. Does it really make sense 
that they would deny Scribus the right to include Pantone colors in our 
palettes? What threat is that? It suggests other things going on in the 
background.

Greg