I need to convert an RGB image to Pantone colors. I had heard that Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop were able to do that, so I spent several mind numbing hours downloading the the free trial version to see if it would even work. And it doesn't even show it as an option. So now I have no way to actually test it to figure out if it's going to work for what I need. Can anyone tell me if either program actually works to convert without just manually going in and selecting each color and recoloring each color one at a time (for which I may as well just be using Ms Paint)?

Illustrator and Photoshop (and InDesign) don't have a Pantone color space. I just see tutorials that tell you how to get/use Pantone swatches or create spot color channels. So you may be stuck with manually selecting each color and switching it to a Pantone color. Or maybe doing CMYK color separations with Pantone spot colors.

Yeah, I eventually figured that out, but it looks like I'd have had to get rid of it anyways. Computer was freezing up and crashing with Ps open. The site says 8gb or RAM and 2ghz is fine, but man, it is so not on my computer. If I open one layer and draw a line in both Paint.net and Ps, Paint.net uses like 3% of the memory that Ps does. I'm not really seeing anything in Ps I need that Paint.net doesn't have, so I ended up just getting rid of it. Can't say I didn't try.

Yeah, Adobe products are more or less notorious for being resource hungry and not playing well with.. anything. They're also full featured in ways not a lot of other programs can claim to be. But between resource use and the rental fee, if you don't need what they have to offer it's better to uninstall and make sure you get rid them along with the update manager and any other Adobe software that came with the download.

With the way Pantone works it may be impossible to make a working color space for it. I tried replacing CMYK channels with Pantone spot colors and even with 'best matches' it made a wonky mess of the color.

Ah I didn't even think to hunt down the update stuff as well. That's a darn good idea. The best idea I came up with for at least getting something close to the pantones was to pull a screenshot in from a pallette and take colors from that. ><