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ColorBlender

27

ColorBlenderNo this is not another version of our beloved Blender, it is however a great tool for the color challenged. Though I'm not so bad as to mix plaids and stripes, I do not have a formal art education and I am a bit color challenged (just ask my teenage daughter). If you're looking to find complementary colors for your primary color or create a nice palate to work from, the ColorBlender tool will be a tremendous help to you.

With ColorBlender you can choose to make your own palate selection of colors by either moving the RGB/HSV sliders or entering the values. You can also pick from hundreds of choices that have been submitted by other users. and If you do create your own palate, you can save it for future use and email right from the site should you need to send it to someone.

And on your palate travels you might start trying to figure out why there is sometimes a difference in RGB values, for example between Photoshop and Blender. Here's what I learned from http://www.dmu.com/bbgtut/bbg34.html. Note - this seems to be Blender related tutorial game making site that I found VIA Google. I could not find the name of the author of it but you Blender Gamers might want to check it out:

Why use a decimal rather then the more traditional 0->255? Using 0->255 or the RGB values only allows 256 different values. Using a decimal allows for an almost infinite number of possibilities i.e.: 0.5, 0.55, 0.5498734Hot Pink = 255, 0, 128

To convert from 0 to 255 RGB values to 0 ->1 RGB values divide by 256

R = 255 / 256 = 1, G = 0/256 = 0, B = 128/256 = 0.5

Photoshop Color Picker blender-color-picker-copy.jpgBlender- Hot Pink

27 Comments

  1. @CubOfJudahsLion: Nope, 0 to 255 is 256 discrete values. 0 is a value, after all.

    The only thing I don't get is that the article states that a decimal gives you more precise color values. But won't your video card round that to the nearest value anyway? SO if say you have Red 127.562 it would display it as Red 128? Anyway, It's such a small change that I doubt it's even noticeable....

  2. take a system color set and johann ittens color boock and just do it.

    than you will not need those tools. what you cannot do on your own
    you do not understand. thus a program cannot do the job for you.

  3. in theory: if a value is stored as decimal, it could make a difference in precision when it is viewed in colorspaces with different precisions. For example, I seem to remember for textures in opengl, you can use different texture formats, which have different precision for each channel, eg RGB565 or RGB8.
    Since for most painting you work in a colorspace with 8 bits in each channel (eg the gimp), there are only 128 shades in each channel.

    I also think it is a bit weird to divide by 256 when including 0 (which means you actually have 257 values, which is not true). when having 256 shades, there is no "mid color". 127 and 128 are closest to the middle, but are not _at_ it.

    but now ON topic :)
    thanks for the tool!

  4. Well, like others mentioned before, the math at the end of the article (and in the linked page) is wrong. In order to map the range 0..255 to 0..1 you have to divide by 255, not 256. The number of discrete values in the range does not matter for this calculation, only the maximum value!

  5. Ok, I understand what people are saying now. You're right, 255 is the maximum value, so 0/255 would still be 0, and 255/255 would be 1.

  6. Anyway, dividing by 255 or by 256 is hardly going to make any noticeable difference. Try this test: In photoshop make a background 128/128/128, then make a text layer with the color 129/129/129, and try to distinguish the text. It's nearly impossible to see anything at all but a pure gray canvas. Then try printing it out. I bet you just get a gray square. SO, this nitpicking about whether to divide by 255 or by 256 really shouldn't make much difference. Perhaps mathematically it's different, but not visually.

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