Color Matching from imported drawings - OSX

[Stefan]

Hi all,

i´m currently working on a project with 500+ parts, which are imported from a 2D Drawing program. What puzzled me was an easy way to get the exact colors from the original file into Shade. You may have also experimented with Shade´s .ai or .dfx import. The problem which occured to me was that imported .ai shapes had no colors and imported .dfx files had not 100% the same colors.

So one could say simply read the RGB values in your 2D drawing app and type then into Shade´s diffuse color box. Well, with more than 500 parts and remembering 3 values this was a definetely no go for me.

Thanks God to the powerful color picker in OSX i figured out the following.
As you can see in my picture i set up Shade on the left and my drawing app on the right for easy navigation.

Now i did the following. I selected my part in my drawing app and copied it to the clip board. Then i switched to Shade (with the surface editor and the color picker open) and then selected the same imported part in Shade. In the color picker i selected the 4th top palette (Image Palette) and under "Palette" i selected "New from Pasteboard". Voilá, now your Shade part has the exact color values like in your 2D drawing app. So no fiddeling with remembering color values, just simply copy and paste. :-)

One side note, pro´s will now argue that Shade´s modern OSX color picker has in the 2nd RGB palette on top a little color symbol on the left where one can choose the color space in which you like to work. Well problem that i have is in my 2D drawing app there´s is no function to use the same color space. I also tried it with a demo of Illustrator CS4 which has this option but it also not matched my colors 100%. Maybe i overlooked a setting there.

Anyways, in case you will have/or had the same problems OSX´s color picker comes to the rescue.



Regards
Stefan

[juanmanuel]

Nice tip
If you're using repeating colours, you could also save the repeated colours as a colorlist (View>Color). It would be a bit more tedious for non-repeating colours, but otherwise time saving. But maybe you already knew this

[Stefan]

Unfortunately my colors are not repeating. But this technique saves me a lot of time and headaches*...;-)

*Before i discovered it i did it with reading and memorizing the color values but i gave up after about 10 objects...:-)

Regards
Stefan