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Revision as of 16:37, 23 June 2011
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This article or section is currently under construction
In principle, someone is working on it and there should be a better version in a not so distant future.
If you want to modify this page, please discuss it with the person working on it (see the "history")
Introduction
Dealing with color is fairly easy if your design is simple. You always can decide just last minute, i.e. on your embroidery machine what colors you would like to stitch with.
For more complex designs and/or designs with many colors, it's better to plan. This tutorials attempts to formulate a few recommendations and tricks.
Prerequisites:
- You should have some sort of understanding of what vector objects, stitch objects (sections) and generated stitches are.
Colors in vector art
Color support for vector graphics is in our opinion a bit weak in Stitch Era. While there is support for color selection and basic color palette management, it is very difficult to know what color you are using in a vector object.
Knowing what color you use
Knowing the color used for an object is relatively easy, but won't help a lot.
- Select the color
Either select
- More colors in the Fill Color or Border Color pull down menu in the main menu bar on top
- or press the Fill Color or Border Color icon to the left near Images panel button (see the arrow in the picture below)
This will give you the color selection panel:
You can see we selected a kind of orange.
Stitch Era supports two color models:
- RGB, defined as amounts of 0-255 Red, 0-255 Green and 0-255 Blue
- HSL, defined as a color number in a color wheel that ranges from 0 to 360 plus saturation and luminosity.
Read the Computer colors tutorial if you need to know more.
Since the almost exact same color can come in dozens of different shades that your eye cannot distinguish, you must work with so-called color palettes. Else you will wind up with a stitch file that will ask you to change 10 different sorts of bright orange. Read on ...
Color palettes
Unfortunately, there a few official and universally used palettes:
- In embroidery world, each thread maker has its own palettes (in the plural)
- For the Internet: HTML 4 defines sixteen colors names. SVG and CSS 3 - based on X11 Color names (Wikipedia) - define a larger set of color names that you can find for example in the CSS 3 color specification. A good overview of both is available in Wikipedia's Web Colors article.
- The only somewhat popular standard large palette are the so-called Pantone colors, but these are not public and difficult to get. In addition, some colors cannot be defined by computer colors like RGB or HSL, e.g. metallic colors. However, not certified subsets of Pantone colors can be found, e.g. at Kamgear. e.g. it can tell that "orange" would be Pantone 1585.
Since Pantone colors is a system that was rather made for physical colors we prefer using the "Internet" X11/CSS/SVG color set. The following table was reproduced from Wikipedia and you can only "see" with a modern web browser.
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Stitch Era Universal, when you install it, comes with a single color palette that include too many pale colors for my taste. To see and change this palette:
- Click on the palette icon to the left near the images button.
- You then can select an item - a so-called swatch - and redefine the color.
I didn't yet create my own carefully planned palette, but at some point I know I should since I really suffer from dealing with too many colors in a design and the resulting messy stitch sections.
If you use the pull-down menu of the palette button (instead of clickin on it) you then can manage your color palettes.
Just for your information, in a vector graphics program like Illustrator, you can add a color swatch by selecting the color.
Knowing what palette color swatch is used
There are two situations:
- The color you use is a swatch of the palette. In this case both the color of the drop down menus on top and the swatch inside will take the aspect of your color. E.g orange for a selected orange part.
- Unfortunately, you can't see in the easier to use palette ribbon to the left what color you select (on the features that Stitch Era should improve).
- The color you use is not part of the palette. In this case, only the color of the drop-down menu icon will change. You can see that we select a light blue shape, but in the palette we still see the prior selected orange color ...
We strongly suggest to use only colors of your palette, else it will be very difficult to make sure that colors that look the same are really the same.
The only way to insure that colors are the same is to select all similar looking colors (good luck) and then to press a swatch that should represent this color. This is IMHO one of the major drawbacks of the vector drawing module. Btw. Stitch Era also should implement sorting of vectors by color as they do for stitch sections.
Colors in stitch sections
Colors in stitch sections are defined by needle number which in turn does have an associated color number. In principle, you should associate a thread color that you have got and we shall see how to do this.
Links
- Thread color lists
See:
- Thread Chart information (best site I found)
- Sewing Thread Conversion Chart
- Thread chart
- Pantone and RA
- Links to Various Thread Charts for Machine Embroidery (long list)
- Conversion charts and tools
- Embroidery Thread Color Conversion Charts at RedRockThreads.com
- PANTONE Color Match (type a pantone number and get the Madeira color).
Brand-specific
- Robinson-Anton (RA)