Percentage Color Wheel

[Bruce Womack]

How does a person find out how to get a percentage chart to make different colors such as yellow, pink, purple, orange and other colors?

[Paul Roberson]

In the latest version of S2 you can click on the "color fade" tool. That will bring up another window. In that window click 'choose'. This will bring up a 'color' window. Click on the color you want. It will show the R,G,B values in the lower right hand corner of this window.

[huskernut]

There are many out there, here are just a couple

http://www.drpeterjones.com/colorcalc/

http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html

but you can pretty much pick your color using the color tool in S2 and see the combinations

Yup like paul said

[bob]

Be warned, though, that the color displayed on your screen might not match the color displayed by your RGB device. You should try some experiments to find what screen colors cause whichever colors you want on the RGB device.

You might want to play around with the "Console" portion of the Hardware Utility to help determine this sort of thing; it lets you drag sliders to affect the individual red, green and blue components, and your RGB device will react to the slider changes in real time.

[BrianBruderer]

bob wrote:

Be warned, though, that the color displayed on your screen might not match the color displayed by your RGB device. You should try some experiments to find what screen colors cause whichever colors you want on the RGB device.

You might want to play around with the "Console" portion of the Hardware Utility to help determine this sort of thing; it lets you drag sliders to affect the individual red, green and blue components, and your RGB device will react to the slider changes in real time.

As Bob has said, the color on your screen will be different than the color on your RGB device. In the sequence editor, when you set an intensity, you are setting a voltage level, not a brightness level. I played around with this and found that as you reduce the voltage intensity from 100% to 0% the intensity of the LED goes down very slowly at first and then drops very fast towards the end. All LEDs behave this way. The following is a chart showing what voltage level to set to get a given brightness:

Brightness Voltage

100% 100%

75% 56%

50% 26%

25% 7%

0% 0%

So for example, to get Orange, you want Red to be at full intensity and Green to be at half intensity. But to get 50% intensity in the LED you need to set the voltage intensity to 26%.

There is another caveate in all this. Typically, the manufacturers of the RGB elements do not make the Red, Green, and Blue elements balanced. If you set Red, Green, and Blue to full intensity you will find that the you don't get a pure white, instead you get a bluish-white. Also, if you set Red to full intensity and Green to full intensity you should get Yellow, but what you will see is a Greenish-Yellow. So in other words, they made the Green and Blue elements brighter than the Red element. To get a true white, you need to dim down the Green and Blue elements a bit. To get a true yellow you need to dim down the Green a bit.

All of this is done automatically in my SuperStar software. When you set an intensity you are setting a brightness intensity, not the voltage intensity. So you get a better match between the colors you see on your screen and the colors on the LEDs. In other words it balances the Red, Green, and Blue so that when you set Red, Green and Blue to 100% you get a true white, and setting Red to 100% and Green to 50% gives a true yellow etc.

However, there is yet another caveate. LEDs are brighter than your screen! A good example is to play around with Orange. If you send voltage levels that give you Red at 100% brightness and Green that gives 50% brightness you will get a good orange on the LED. To get a dimmer orange, you would cut both the Red and Green in half, so you would want Red at 50% and Green at 25%. On your computer screen a dim orange looks sort of like a muddy brown. But on the LED, what you will see is a "less bright" Orange because those LEDs are so darn bright!

Software can balance out the colors so that an Orange is an Orange, but it can't make your computer screen brighter. So there is no way to make the colors on your computer screen look like the colors on an LED. So when you do colors that are not at full intensity, you have to keep in mind that with LEDs you basicaly get Bright and Less Bright and it is hard to get a dim color!

-Brian Bruderer

[WayneKremer]

Knowing that the CCR's behave differently on the whole color/voltage issue, has anyone created a CCR color chart to show the intensity to color values?