Hey,

I thought this was kinda funny.

I'm running Houdini on two monitors whose colours tend to drift from alignment. The left monitor has the Houdini Network panes, etc, and the right has a large viewport. I placed a COLOR COP down on the left hand monitor, and clicked on the colour browser. I noticed the colour in the COP Viewport on the right-hand screen looked quite different. Damn Monitors. Then, I dragged the colour browser over to the right-hand monitor, on top of the viewport. Uh? Now they're on the same monitor and they're still different. ah. yep… okay.

The colours are generated by different processes, sure, but I didn't expect the difference to be so marked. I guess there's a viewport (gamma?) display setting somewhere which might correct them. I set my “xgamma” to 1, and the viewport gamma control to 1, and they still looked different.

Still, gamma's not going to help much if the pixels are different values. I ran “xv” on the two oranges in the screen grab attached. Middle mouse interactively displays pixel values. For the attached image it says:

The COP Viewport HSV is (14,99,100) RGB is (255,64,1)
Colour Browser swatch HSV is (32,100,100) RGB is (255,136,0)

It's not a big deal. Hell, my monitors can vary this much :-)
Caveat enter!

cheers,
ben.

duplicated in build 80_394…since Ben isn't using 8

I thought this was just because you guys have HOUDINI_COLOR_PICKER_GAMMA set to 2.2.

bah…stupid Ben…and stupid me…..ah what the hell…stupid ed too…

First person to explain why the color picker has its own gamma setting wins lunch.

(Contest only available to residents of Toronto)

I'll abstain since I have an unfair advantage

Sure…

(only if the answer is a good one, and if you just quote a RFE # i'll make you buy lunch)





note: this made sense before silly ed changed his post, basically it send something about arctor being smelly

Setting that HOUDINI_COLOR_PICKER_GAMMA preference breaks the middle-mouse drag-select feature of color parameters too. I've built some COPs tools with several color parameters listed together. Users expect to be able to copy one color parameter to another by middle-mouse clicking and dragging over the color they want to copy. They get mightily confused when the resulting colour doesn't match!
:roll:

I guess it only really matters if your monitors are not calibrated ( mine are so out of whack that they are actually *different colors!* )
having said that…the HOUDINI_COLOR_PICKER_GAMMA makes me nervous

Actually, I'm talking about working in a single monitor but with that gamma override preference set. To go back to Ben's first post, setting the gamma to 2.2 would have resulted in the color-picker having a colour that matched the colour displayed in the COP viewport. However, the drag-select feature seems to gamma-correct whatever colour you mouse-over meaning copying color parameters is unreliable.