Want to view Lab values in ColorThink?

A customer asked us recently:

In ColorThink, is there a way to manually enter individual Lab colors and plot them in the 2D or 3D graphs?

The answer is: Yes!

In the manual, in the section on the grapher, there is an example of a simple Lab color list you can create in seconds in any text program. You can just copy and paste this from the ColorWiki manual into your text program:

ColorWiki: ColorThink_Pro

Or copy it from here:

BEGIN_DATA_FORMAT

Lab_L Lab_a Lab_b

END_DATA_FORMAT

BEGIN_DATA

91 -2 96

44 -29 2

END_DATA

Substitute the "91 -2 96" with Lab values of your own choosing, tab to create the space between numbers, make the list as long as you like, save it as a text file, and you can drag this file into the grapher or worksheet - and your Lab colors will be displayed.

You can also create these simple Lab color lists by bringing an image into the worksheet and clicking on it with the eye dropper tool. A list is automatically populated and you can Save List As... to export a text file or open it in the Grapher.

Take your own picture of outer atmosphere for $800

This story out of Britain is for those of us financially strapped individuals who have always had a love for photography and a love for flying.

A 38 year-old man launches high altitude balloons and takes pictures of the earth from the upper atmosphere. He "captures pictures of earth using a standard camera fixed to a weather balloon."

The story:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7514429/Father-captures-pictures-of-earth-using-camera-fixed-to-weather-balloon.html

His photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30721501@N05/

Sharp's Quattron goes to 11!

Sharp has introduced their new Quattron technology, adding a 4th channel (yellow) to their LCD TV.

The claim is that the new channel will be "Introducing never-before-seen colors to LCD TVs, like sparkling golds, Caribbean blues and sunflower yellows..."

Sound too good to be true? Have you been sitting in front of your TV thinking "where are all my yellows?!?" Are you wondering how Sharp can create yellows that weren't in the original signal?

I admit, I'm curious... has anyone built a profile for their run-of-the-mill LCD TV recently? How does it compare to sRGB (which is the space for HDTV)? If you have one, please send it over and we'll do a little looky see. I'll update this post with what we find.

Check it out.

X-Rite Edges Into Black

Returning to (slight) profitability for the first time since 2007, X-Rite books $0.1 million in profit for Q4 2009.

Read the Press Release

Where's Geeves?

Mark Geeves is an industry veteran in the classic sense of the word. He has the experience and the scars. He's co-founded a new company to supply "special effects" to the print industry. Good luck Mark!

Color-Logic provides special effects to the print industry

New CHROMiX Blog

Welcome to our new blog.

What's it all about?

    Short technical snippits, industry news, cool technologies, and CHROMiX announcements. You know, the usual blog fodder. Only now it's concentrated on Color Management technologies and produced by the company who brought you remote ICC profiling, 3D color gamut graphing, G7 calibration software and the producer of the most widely read color newsletter.

Why now?

  We've had a great newsletter at CHROMiX for many years now and we've been republishing the articles to ColorWiki.com to ensure they have some "shelf life" online. But what we found is our newsletters were growing longer and longer at a time when we all have less time to read things. Many quick facts, products and technologies that we announce and/or link to in the newsletters yearned to be released more often than the newsletter cycle we follow (1-2 months).

Who Contributes?

  All of us at CHROMiX may contribute to the blog. Expect to see technical missives and hints from Pat Herold, industry and product information from Rick Hatmaker and a wide variety of postings and ramblings from Steve Upton. There's no set schedule for who may post and that's the way we want it. When we find something we think you'll like, it'll head out to the blog so you can stay informed in a timely way.

What about the ColorNews newsletter? 

  We love our newsletter and thousands of readers around the world do too. This blog will allow us to shorten the newsletter and link out to blog entries so you don't miss anything if you only read the newsletter. The automation it provides will make newsletters easier to produce and that means more effort on great color content. In short the blog will make the newsletter leaner and more appropriate for its publication frequency.

So, welcome. We're glad you came by and we hope you come back soon. There's lots more on its way!

Steve Upton
Insufferable Color Geek