Inspiring

Question

Color sampler getting wrong color

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 3, 2023
2 replies
1564 views

When I click the eyedropper and drag it onto a solid color in Safari, the color comes into the Photoshop foreground noticably lighter and more saturated. Restarting Photoshop didn’t help.

I’m trying to capture a color from a swatch on the Adobe Color website. The Mac color sampling tool, "Sip," says the color on the Adobe site is 90BDDE (agreeing with what the web page says), and it says the one in the Photoshop foreground is 94B8D8.

When I sample a color from an image in Photoshop, it also comes into the color picker much lighter and more saturated.

Here's a screenshot, where you can see the difference between two colors with the same hex code:

Environment:

M1 MacBook Air, macOS Ventura 13.4.1

Current versions of Photoshop and Safari

EIZO CS 2740 display

Photoshop:

ProPhoto RBG color space (same problem with Adobe RBG)

Point sampling with the tool. Solid swatches on the Adobe Color site.

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

rbanks88Author

Inspiring

Thanks to everyone for your generous help! I've learned a lot.

When I set the Eizo to sRBG, and converted the document to sRGB, 90BBDE looked about the same in Adobe Color and in the Photoshop color picker.

I see that the best approach for me is to use Adobe Color as a guide to the color relationships, and not rely on the numbers.

I found I can make a solid color adjustment layer (Color blend mode), adjust the color picker's HSB to get reasonably close to what I see in Adobe Color, and then use hue/saturation and levels adjustments to get very close after I've made other adjustments to the image. I can use pinned screenshots of the swatches to get them side-by-side with the color picker and actual image areas, making comparison even easier.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Adobe Color is not color managed. The numbers aren't tagged with a specific color space. Use with caution.

Hex is just base 16 notation for ordinary RGB numbers. Numbers are color space specific. The same numbers will yield different colors in different color spaces:

Major web browsers today will treat untagged material as sRGB. But Photoshop will treat untagged material as the working RGB.

Numbers without an associated color space are undefined. The only way to get consistent color is to keep track of color spaces and make sure there always is an embedded profile to define the colors.

rbanks88Author

Inspiring

Thanks for the quick response, and your helpful examples.

Do I have this right? It looks like when the eyedropper leaves the PS color-managed workspace and strays out into the uncontrolled window of the Adobe Color web page, it notes the color on the page as displayed on my Eizo screen -- not what the hex label under that color says. The dropper puts in the color picker the hex code for the color it's actually seeing, and that’s why it’s a different number.

Here's what I’m trying to accomplish:

Pick a color in a photograph, and see what other colors the Adobe Color site "recommends" to go with it.
Select one of those matching colors and then color another object in the photo with that color, using a Solid Color adj. layer.

Should I just go by the numbers?

Use the eyedropper to get the color in the photograph for which I want to find a match.
Look at the color picker for the color's hex code
Enter that code in Adobe Color
Note the code for one of the matching colors I want to use
Put that code in the color picker when I create the solid color adjustment layer.

Thanks,
Russell

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

"It looks like when the eyedropper leaves the PS color-managed workspace and strays out into the uncontrolled window of the Adobe Color web page, it notes the color on the page as displayed on my Eizo screen -- not what the hex label under that color says" Absolutely. To make effective use of these colours you need to

(a) work with the numbers

(b) set your document to sRGB (probably, though it does depend on your browser).

There is nothing absolute or fixed about a set of hex colours. They will be different for everyone. This is the problem with Adobe Color, and all other color swatch web sites, which is that they are made in a make-believe world where sRGB is the only game in town. I don't see the use of them myself, since they are so far removed from what is actually needed in a color-managed app like Photoshop.

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