Photoshop lets you put Pantone colors in, where instead of having an RGB value, the pixel will actually have a tag saying this is "Pantone Old Cabbage Green #03," which Photoshop displays as some specific RGB value. But if you send it to a printer using the Pantone system instead of looking at that RGB value, they'll look up the specific set of inks they're supposed to use for Pantone Old Cabbage Green #03 and use them.
Because this deals with physical printing of colors, many of which can't even be displayed on a computer screen to begin with, this is completely useless without a physical booklet of the colors. Pantone sells these for like $1000 a pop, and they have to be replaced yearly because the ink yellows with age. So anyone who actually needs this is already paying Pantone a fat stack of money.
(That said, it's entirely possible that this is Adobe being greedy bastards, not Pantone. Or both! It's capitalism after all.)
It's really Adobe's fault for including a "convert to Pantone" button in the first place, the entire concept makes no sense and a lot of people must have clicked on it because the tooltip promises "print-safe color" thinking it must be better or something like that.
Photoshop lets you put Pantone colors in, where instead of having an RGB value, the pixel will actually have a tag saying this is "Pantone Old Cabbage Green #03," which Photoshop displays as some specific RGB value. But if you send it to a printer using the Pantone system instead of looking at that RGB value, they'll look up the specific set of inks they're supposed to use for Pantone Old Cabbage Green #03 and use them.
Because this deals with physical printing of colors, many of which can't even be displayed on a computer screen to begin with, this is completely useless without a physical booklet of the colors. Pantone sells these for like $1000 a pop, and they have to be replaced yearly because the ink yellows with age. So anyone who actually needs this is already paying Pantone a fat stack of money.
(That said, it's entirely possible that this is Adobe being greedy bastards, not Pantone. Or both! It's capitalism after all.)
It's really Adobe's fault for including a "convert to Pantone" button in the first place, the entire concept makes no sense and a lot of people must have clicked on it because the tooltip promises "print-safe color" thinking it must be better or something like that.