Are there printed color tables available for the RGB lighting systems?

I am looking at moving from gels to 3-channel RGB lighting, and the challenge is knowing how to adjust the 3 channels to get the colors you want.

Additive color mixing is not an intuitive process, so it would be helpful if I could put a color table booklet with our light board showing how to set the three R/G/B sliders to get various colors.

The operators of the light board are going to be grade 7-12 students, not lighting professionals, so I cannot expect to have people who have memorized various slider positions.

- Dale

You can look online. the RGb dmx values translate very nicely to HTML hexadecimal charts found online. hope that helps. i assume you know about RGB additive mixing?
Sincerely,

Heh, well remember the target audience is kids in grades 7-12. Most kids do not understand hexadecimal so I am not too thrilled at the prospect of having to teach them that.

Especially when the Scene Setter we have displays values in decimal, and so they'd need to do conversion on the fly in the head. Ugh.

What I'm really looking for is a picture book showing images of three physical sliders set from 0-255 for each color, with a number below the slider showing the value.

This way it becomes a simple process of, look up color, set the three sliders to roughly match the printed slider picture, and fine-adjust to match exact slider values if desired.

- Dale

No, all I meant was that you could use a hexadecimal chart to help you with your booklet that you'll have to print. However i have taught my almost 7 year old daughter basic dmx and how to use a magic 260.
sincerely,

Okay, I've thrown together a simple graphic in Microsoft Word with the drawing tools, then saved them as GIFs...



Which is enough to make a 6x6x6 color cubemap (216 colors). This then gets thrown into a simple HTML table...

<table cellpadding="0" cellborder="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr align="center">
    <td rowspan=2 bgcolor="#FFCC33"> </td>
    <td><b>Red</b></td>
    <td><b>Green</b></td>
    <td><b>Blue</b></td>
    <td>   </td>
    <td rowspan=2 bgcolor="#660099"> </td>
    <td><b>Red</b></td>
    <td><b>Green</b></td>
    <td><b>Blue</b></td>
  </tr><tr>
    <td><img src="http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/slide-ff.gif"></td>
    <td><img src="http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/slide-cc.gif"></td>
    <td><img src="http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/slide-33.gif"></td>
    <td>   </td>
    <td><img src="http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/slide-66.gif"></td>
    <td><img src="http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/slide-00.gif"></td>
    <td><img src="http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/slide-99.gif"></td>
  </tr><tr align="center">
    <td> Hex: </td>
    <td>FF</td>
    <td>CC</td>
    <td>33</td>
    <td>   </td>
    <td> Hex: </td>
    <td>66</td>
    <td>00</td>
    <td>99</td>
  </tr><tr align="center">
    <td>Dec:</td>
    <td>255</td>
    <td>204</td>
    <td>051</td>
    <td>   </td>
    <td>Dec:</td>
    <td>102</td>
    <td>000</td>
    <td>153</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Which looks like this..

That looks good. Are you gonna change the Hex and Dec sections to reflect actual DMX values?
Sincerely,

I do not know what you mean by "actual DMX values". Currently I do not yet have an RGB LED system and am just planning for the future when we may get some.

When using three separate sliders, what other DMX values are there?

Never mind i looked at the pic wrong. the Dec is the DMX value.
Sincerely,

Okay! Here is my completed set of RGB LED color tables for the American DJ Scene Setter:

http://www.lakeholcombe.k12.wi.us/dale/theater/rgbmap/d...for-scene-setter.htm

It looks huge on the screen, but it can be shrunk down and printed with Firefox onto just six pages. I've also left room along the top for 3-hole punching of the charts so they can go into a binder that stays with the light board:



Printing instructions are included at the end of the tables page.

- Dale Mahalko

Seems a bit too much work, but that's right. But for your appliation, the work is appropriate. For mine, it wasn't as difficult. My objective was "match RGB values to colors on color wheels on other fixtures".

Decimal value is 0-255 is the value range used per R,G&B respectively, which matches with DMX values. I don't think this is accidental.

My suggestion is to use those sheet protectors instead of 3-hole punching because they seem to last longer that way. But I do agree that keeping them close to the lighting console is definately the way to go.

You can also use the same chart for using banks of 3 can lights gel'ed R,G&B aimed at fixed points to do the same funtion.

The DMX Operator will tell you what value you move the slider to(before changing back to another reading), so you do have a method of checking your work. It's not perfect, but it does work well enough, but if you're under pressure to get things done, the delay of setting 3 faders will be an issue in tight situations only. The rest, you'll be fine.

Good work.
And nice clean HTML. So tired of seeing HTML-programs generating bloaded mark-up.

It was fairly easy. I wrote a program in QBASIC to split out the appropriate HTML to a text file.

The next challenge is accurate color rendering. The cheap HP $400 color laser printer I used produced some rather muddy looking blues. Blue looks much darker on the page than on the screen.

It's too bad some company around here doesn't have color guidance sheets like this professionally printed, color-matched, and sold as part of their inventory, to go along with their RGB lighting products.

- Dale

Well, RGB is fairly good, but I find that you have to use CMYK or Pantone for ensuring totally accurate colors when printing. Even so, the reason that companies don't do as you suggest is because it can be expensive to produce.

I'm working on a DVD project right now and they handed me this really good "style guide" to ensure proper colors were used, along with all sorts of other good information. Let's put it this way, not all of it applied to me, but the parts I needed, it definately made things easier.

My suggestion might be to use photo printing paper for inkject printers. That really seems to help. That and the "photo" ink cartridges. I switched from using regular printable CD's and DVD-R's to disks with a smudge-proof surface and it makes a world of differnce. I don't have a "photo" inkjet cartridge option because of the unit(Primera Bravo), but everything looks better on the smudgeproof discs.

Since you're going to be hopefully doing infrequent one-off prints, the costs should remain relatively affordable. Using the sheet protectors just gives an extra layer of protection.

I would think a batch of "really super common colors" should be sufficient. I'm using R,G,B, light blue, yellow, amber, pink, purple, dark red, dark blue, dark green and some other colors to match the various color wheels. After that, I can go RGB with my gel'ed Par38's and my 64 LED Pros.

I can't give any real guidance as far as colors are concerned. Different places have different idas. Go with the basics, expand from there. Best I can guess. The good thing is that the way you're approaching things, there is no "wrong", just a good reference to get things going quickly.