[Improvement] Colour Filter selection and global palettes

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TWC
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[Improvement] Colour Filter selection and global palettes

Postby TWC » 13 Sep 2020, 20:59

i know this is probably not specifically related to the beta software so it may be better in the general discussion section.

can somebody give me a brief rundown of the internal workings of the colour filter section, and how that relates to what channel data is applied to a colour palette, i get unpredictable results when using a global palette or even a shared palette, for example if I have a fixture which has RGBAL emitters and choose a colour filter and then try to apply that palette to a fixture which is RGBA or RGBAWP for example the colour output is completely different, I suspect this is because those extra colour channels are not referenced by the palette so only the values in the palette are applied to the other fixture type.

how are the channel values derived? i'm assuming that there is some sort of conversion table that the software looks up perhaps from known pantone values. obviously certain fixtures will not make certain colours however hard you try by virtue of the fact you cant create a colour if you dont have the correct emitter types but i'm mainly thinking about the times when 2 identical colours can be achieved by mixing the channels of different fixture types in different proportions.

what i believe to be the case here, correct me if i'm wrong, is that that channel values are only 'looked up' once at the time the palette is created, and any other fixture types you try to use the same palette are referencing the existing channel values in the palette when it's executed and not making a discreet reference to the values in the filter picker itself.

the issue becomes more obvious if say for example a base set of colour palettes were recorded on an RGB fixture, then say you record a white palette with an RGBW fixture, now when you select the RBGW fixture and use the palettes from the RGB fixture, the white value may well stay on until you explicitly set the W channel to 0. I am aware of this issue so i tend to merge colour data over the top of existing palettes when i have a fixture with different colour emitters but this can be quite time consuming.

i would dearly love it if the way the filters are referenced became 'per fixture type' rather than a 'once only', apologies for the essay on this but it's something that's always irritated me as a Lampy. i hope this makes sense to you all

regards, Tom
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phb
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Re: Colour Filter selection and global palettes

Postby phb » 14 Sep 2020, 12:32

Hi Tom,

I think the key thing to understand about the current implementation of the colour filter picker is that selecting a filter is handled in exactly the same way as picking a colour in the HSI colour picker: it's applied in the programmer to the colour channels of the selected fixtures as attribute values immediately. Consequently, when you're later creating a palette with those values in the programmer, the console has no idea that the colour values originally came from a colour filter, and all of the usual rules surrounding colour palettes across fixture types apply. This results in the behaviour you describe.

As you suspect, this has not changed recently - but there is a task to make colour filters act like they were palettes themselves, which would achieve what you were looking for - 78329. This would probably have to be an ideas & features candidate in order to see the light of day. Alternatively there have been conversations about changing how colour is represented more fundamentally within the console which would also help here, but that will be a longer-term project.

Hope this helps,
Pete Bridgman :: Avolites

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