Color (how do I find the "name or number" associated with a color

I have given up on trying to get anyone at AppleCare to be able to either explain it or put me onto someone who can.

Apple's business model is to build the boxes Adobe's products run on, and not to compete either with Adobe or with Microsoft as a software publisher.

This problem has nothing to do either with the drawing model of the International Color Consortium or with the drawing model of the Unicode Consortium.

Previously, Apple could not publish a brochure advertising Apple's implementation of the ICC drawing model using Apple software and presently Apple can not publish a brochure advertising Apple's implementation of the Unicode drawing model using Apple software. What you want is more competition, because more competition means better software and better support.

Reference for you to read:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/Colorsync-users/2001/Dec/msg00175.html

To find the hexadecimal index of the limited colour safe palette go to the Apple colour chooser and select the colour palettes tab (3rd one) and select websafe. (it's for web pages to try and get colours that will show similarly on Macs and PCs and anything else but vast display differences mean it's of limited value)

Colour will match if colour matching is configured and if digital graphic devices are calibrated and the calibration is captured in ICC characterisations (ICC colour device profiles).

If colour management is configured, it does not matter what platform or application is used as source and destination, but I'll grant that colour management is rarely configured and interface implementations are complex and confusing.

/hh

Welecome to discussions Ian,

You've asked a seemingly simple and innocent question but colour management is a can-o-worms. The short answer is "I don't know what 'alphnumberic' of a colour is, despite reading "Real World Color Management" twice. He may be referring to the web-safe Hexadecimal code for your colours. This will not ensure colour accuracy though, only a colour managed process can do this.

If neither of you know anything about colour management (and using profiles) then that's going to be a bit of a learning curve. Some relevant questions are what platforms will PS version end up on? What is the source imagery?

To find the hexadecimal index of the limited colour safe palette go to the Apple colour chooser and select the colour palettes tab (3rd one) and select websafe. (it's for web pages to try and get colours that will show similarly on Macs and PCs and anything else but vast display differences mean it's of limited value)

The easiest way to find the colour of anything on a Mac is to go to the Applications and in the Utilities folder launch DigitalColor Meter. This application will tell you the color value of whatever pixel the cursor is over, and can show that value in several different formats. It is a hugely handy utility. As wideEyedPupil says, however, that will only tell you what your Mac thinks the colour is, and not necessarily what the colour is that you see produced by your monitor, which is a much more complex question. This may not matter if colour fidelity is not crucial, but if you want perfect reproduction of what you see, you need more professional techniques.

I am asking someone to help me make a Photoshop copy of the presentation that I have built in Keynote. He asked me for the color "alphanumeric" related to the colors I have used in my presentation to make sure that it perfectly matches but I can't seem to find that information. Please let me know how I can find it...

Briefly, if you interchange a bitmap format such as TIFF or JPEG, an ICC MNTR Monitor profile will be embedded by the application exporting the bitmap. The application opening the bitmap will use that ICC MNTR Monitor profile to construct a ColorWorld that matches to the colour space of the digital graphic device used for instantiating / imaging / rendering / consuming that bitmap, most often the ICC MNTR Monitor profile for the current condition of the colour display.

If you interchange a page description such as PDF, then the same thing happens except that a page description is object-oriented and each object in the page description can be in its own colour model and in its own colour management model. PDF is a modification of PostScript languag level 2 which means that it supports deviceColour and calibratedColour (PostScript's own obsolete colour management system). PDF 1.3 and higher supports ICCBased colour.

So, the ICC MNTR Monitor profile embedded in your TIFF or JPEG, or embedded as ICCBased in your PDF, defines the COLOURS that the COLOURANTS in you object should form on other colour devices when the importing application creates a ColourWorld, whether using its own ICC API or an operating system ICC API. There is no such thing as deviceColour any more, that is, colourant combinations do not define colours. You need either a CIEL a*b D50 2 degree standard observer measurement or you need an ICC device profile (preferably linearised MNTR Monitor with data sapce RGB) or non-device profile (NMCL Named Color, SPAC Colour Space or ABST Abstract).

Similarly, I am not sending you glyphs in this post. I am sending you characters in this post. You system will show you the glyphs by looking for an SFNT Spline Font file whose CMAP Character Map can image the characters I am sending you. And if I send you characters not in the CMAP Character Map of one SFNT, the system will search its database of SFNT's for one which has a CMAP that will draw a default glyph design for that incoming character code.

Neither the drawing model for ICC imaging nor the drawing model for Unicode imaging works in any way as you assume -:).

/hh

The easiest way to find the colour of anything on a Mac is to go to the Applications and in the Utilities folder launch DigitalColor Meter. This application will tell you the color value of whatever pixel the cursor is over, and can show that value in several different formats. It is a hugely handy utility.

The Digital Colour Meter was introduced in ColorSync 2.5. The CIE colours it shows are the colours in the currently selected ICC MNTR Monitor profile for the colour display.

Colour should not be specified in the colour space of the currently selected ICC MNTR Monitor profile since it is a physical device space with the non-linearities of a physical device space.

By default, the Apple Colour Picker sets a linear ICC MNTR Monitor profile as the source space for specifying colours in RGB mode and HSB mode: Generic RGB Profile.

/hh

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:
If colour management is configured,... *but I'll grant that colour management is rarely configured* and interface implementations are complex and confusing.

/hh

That's what I'm talkin' about.

Photographers can spend $5000 on a display and calibration system and send colour profile tagged files to a client who is seeing totally different colours from the same file in the same application with the same colour management settings because the client display is way off calibration. Then the client orders changes the photographer knows are wrong... can be costly.

Still, if this document isn't going to end up offset printed or displayed in a colour critical environment tagging (or conversion if images are already ICC profiled as something else) to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 should be satisfactory. Then the RGB numbers can be given... which are decimal numbers not alphanumerics which implies hexadecimal code to me hence the web-safe palette option.

Photographers can spend $5000 on a display and calibration system and send colour profile tagged files to a client who is seeing totally different colours from the same file in the same application with the same colour management settings because the client display is way off calibration.

Sure, but this was the case when the original was on film or paper, too. Colour is relative to light, in particular to the colour temperature of the light. A transparency or a paper positive changed colour appearance when the viewing condition changed. It's just that today there are instruments capable of measuring the colour under the controlled parameters of a colour temperature, there is a file format for communicating colour, and there is system software and application software that consumes this file format.

The evening television news in Denmark first came in colour in 1978, putting pressure on publishers of periodicals to print daily newspapers and weekly or monthly magasines in colour. CIEL a*b is based on an algorithm defined by the CIE in 1976. The first fully paginated colour printing process (the printing surface for composition and separation exposed in the same pass on a laser system) was first shown by Dr.-Ing. Rudolf H e l l GmbH at the Flensburger Zeitung in Kiel in 1984 and in the same year Crosfield Electronics Ltd showed this at IPEX in the UK using a Monotype Lasercomp imagesetter. The International Color Consortium was founded in 1993, and today about a billion computers can be colour managed.

Naturally, an enormous educational effort is necessary, but that is to be expected.

/hh

Henrik,

The problem of environmental lighting and paper stock remains with color management.

All that color management does is remove some of the human decision making from the process.

Far more doable and overall reliable is to use cmyk specification and targets in the artwork. If the printer has all the equipment and software at their disposal to make press adjustments when it hits the paper, that is fine by me.

Being put in the in-viable position of trying to control, and being held responsible for, factors outside of the designer's control is what concerns me.

Peter

Is that a billion computers with Spyders and neutral controlled light environments?

And are those billion computer users informed by the software manufacturers as to how to actually achieve usable accurate color. Just as Apple does! | eyesroll |

I have given up on trying to get anyone at AppleCare to be able to either explain it or put me onto someone who can.

Consult the book I referenced at the top of the thread as a good start point. At least you can then ask the hard questions of the 'expert' technology suppliers. The authors of the book debunk quite a lot of over simplification of colour management put about by the likes of apple and adobe in their software and documents.

It is just a really complicated subject and there is no getting around the fact that there is basic science to understand before you know what's going on with CM. I'm sure there are specialist consultants around. I know there are pre-press specialist companies that just handle the pre-press phase of print jobs to get them right.

I have many books on the subject, none of which demonstrate any personal ability to make it work in their own publication.

As far as I am concerned Color Management is right up there with the weather and peace and brotherhood for all. Everyone talks about it but doesn't do anything about it.

Printers can use it internally and with some trusted clients who are willing to commit to them and them alone.

P.

You could simply ignore all this color matching stuff and give him the RGB values of the colors in your presentation. Keynote uses the OS color panel, which has a mag glass for sampling color in Keynote, and has an RGB view, so you can visibly see the 3 colors numbers that make up the color (red value, green value, blue value).

I suspect that's all he wanted anyway.

You could simply ignore all this color matching stuff and give him the RGB values of the colors in your presentation. Keynote uses the OS color panel, which has a mag glass for sampling color in Keynote, and has an RGB view, so you can visibly see the 3 colors numbers that make up the color (red value, green value, blue value).

To specify colour in RGB combinations, open the Apple Colour Palette and without changing the default source colour space, create the colours you want. These colours will be created in the Generic RGB Profile source colour space.

Using the Digital Colour Meter, the RGB combinations refer to the current ICC profile for the monitor. This is neither the same on any two machines nor is a measured ICC device profile for a monitor graybalanced.

There is no such thing as ignoring colour matching today. In OS X, the ICC drawing model is always on just as the Unicode drawing model is always on.

/hh

It's a while since I read it, but Real World Color Management does have flow charts describing the colour management processes for different parts of their book. Unbelievably complicated they are too. Required long periods of study for me to follow the decision making. I'm not going to comment on how well the book went to print as I can't remember. The authors are experts on CM not writers looking for a title.

Still a good knowledge of CM at least lets one identify where big problems are occurring. Most designers I have worked with and IT consultants asked why the printouts/plots are so different from each other and the screen just say "convert your file to CMYK" as if that's a panacea. There are good reasons to stay in RBGA in plenty of workflows.

Mac OS X Color Panel was suggested at the start of the thread in the context of the Web Safe colour Tab. It's the word 'alphanumeric' which made the query a bit left-field. Alphanumeric suggests letters and numbers which is why Hexadecimal RGB values was suggested.

Colour management is relevant (to those of us discussing it at least) because in my experience people give 3 little RGB numbers then expect to see the same colour in a new context like the printed page or a PC monitor. Then somebody says "Oh you got the colour very wrong" when things aren't as simple as they expected it to be. This typically happens around a Brand logo colour or colour palettes for products in ads/catalogues. If you've had to deal with this in a professional capacity it can be an uphill climb.

I suspect that RGB was what he wanted too but not sure what he's going to get!