Legend

Question

Color Theme Tool vs Color.Adobe.com

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
December 16, 2016
2 replies
3527 views

Why is there such a difference between the colors generated out the same image with both color.adobe.com and InDesign's own Color Theme Tool?

After much experimenting, I can only conclude that the Color Theme Tool is far from "matching" color.adobe.com in quality.

I may be missing something obvious, after all this time.

Here's a simple example, an sRGB image I picked the other day on Facebook.

The Document Intent is "Print" ("Web" in the above screen capture), so the Color Theme Tool generates CMYK colors, out of the sRGB image. That's expected.

Granted, color.adobe.com generated themes are encoded in CIE Lab space.

To do a fair comparison, I made sure to "Proof" colors, so that the CIE Lab colors don't overly look "bright" as compared to their InDesign counterpart.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Color Theme Tool is a neat little addition to InDesign's toolbox but, as it stands, according to my limited understanding, it systematically "dumbs down" the colors of ANY image, regardless of the Document Intent (I experimented both ways, Print and Web, tried all the settings in the Color Theme Tool options).

The cherry on the icing, if I may say so, with the implementation on color.adobe.com, is the fact that, upon completion, it's plain to see where the "tool" sampled the colors from, as shown here:

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J

Jeffrey_Smith

Community Expert

In Indesign, do you have your display performance set to high quality display before you do an image sampling?

Roger BretonAuthor

Legend

Good suggestion Jeffrey!

I'm glad to report that it brightened the swatches a bit. Worth it.

So, the "main" RGB color I get from sampling the image with the Shift key down, with the Color Theme Tool is 209 114 122.

Using the old or "regular" color picker, that value is 240 104 126, dazzlingly bright by comparison.

Something else is going on...

Roger BretonAuthor

Legend

Jeffrey's suggestion led me to take a closer look at that Mad Hatter image, in Photoshop...

Clearly, the area I'm sampling from with the Color Theme Tool, has suffered heavy JPEG compression (typical 8x8 square pattern).

It makes sense to think that both the regular Color Picker and the Color Theme Tool are NOT sampling a 1x1 pixel area but a larger one from which they must be "averaging" the color. I don't how large it is (5x5% 11x11? 20x20?).

So I selected an area in the Mad Hatter's hat, in Photoshop, and used the Average filter on it, to make sure that, upon "picking" in InDesign, it would have a uniform area to select from.

That resulted in a small improvement in brightness overall -- lesson learned, but still, a far cry from the original RGB color.

The original Photoshop "area" is RGB 245 119 143.

After sampling with the Color Theme Tool, using the Shift key down, it becomes RGB 213 128 140, still "darker"?

The green and blue component are "close" (125 vs 119 and 140 vs 143) but the red is out of line (213 vs 243).

Roger BretonAuthor

Legend

Here's a fresh, new experiment this morning.

The Document Intent is Web.

I used the Shift key along with the Color Theme Tool to capture this single color in the mad hatter's hat.

I get the 6 harmony rules.

Generated swatches are in RGB space.

For curiosity, I took a sample of the same area with the old Color Picker tool -- see swatch on the right, top.

Why does the color has to be "dumbed-down" from what it is, in the image? Why? Why? Oh why?

It's as though the color *has* to be converted to the Working CMYK space *first", before being converted to RGB.

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