Colour pipette

Which RGB-, Lab-, RAL-,...colour has a certain monitor range?

The pipette collects the RGB-colour values of the monitor, that is it pulls them from any programs. This is very practical. Working in cooperation with the program "Nearest RAL-colours" one can, for example, determine the appropriate RAL-colours to a photograph of a facade.

Often required: Read RGB- and other colour values off of any program!
The tool also shows the appropriate RAL-colour or harmonic colours.

 

Short instructions

1. Set your monitor to the TrueColor-mode (16,7 million colours).
2. Start the program "colour pipette" and draw the mouse over the monitor area which contains the colour you would like to know about.
3. Press "enter" as soon as you see the desired colour in the colour field. The pipette will be frozen, that means if you move the pipette the colour field will not change.
4. Select "Nearest RAL", to find out what the appropriate RAL colour is, or press "harmony", if you would like to know which colours are well suited to the colour you collected.
5. Press "enter" a second time in order to reactivate the pipette.
6. Click on the small arrow and you will see further colour coordinates to each colour next to the RGB-colour values.

Please note: The pipette blocks the use of the clipboard
The pipette uses the clipboard in order to copy colour values. As long as the pipette window is open no other information can be copied to the clipboard.

Regarding the quality of the RGB-colour values

In contrast to an image processing program the RAL C1 DIGITAL colour pipette does not necessarily collect the RGB-values of the file displayed on the monitor, rather they are collected from the monitor display itself.
Although these values are identical, as long as a TrueColor-monitor display is concerned and no colour management is activated, yet they depart from each other when the colour depth is lesser or a colour management program is „mucking things up“. Take CorelDRAW as an example: when attempting to ascertain RGB-colours with the RAL pipette, in CorelDRAW, the colour management has to be deactivated by going into "extras/options". Photoshop, Freehand, Illustrator, InDesign, and QuarkXpress are all similar.

No CMYK-colour values

The colour pipette can not ascertain any CMYK-colour values, rather it can only ascertain their RGB-equivalent in the respective program. This is, for example, also true for the Acrobat-files for output variations that have CMYK-colour values as their basis (CMYK-offset print). As soon as CMYK is converted into RGB for the monitor there is quality loss in the darker colours.

Thus, as an example, the dark green tones of the RAL-standard colours, in the variation artprint, are displayed as (R, G, B) = (0, 0, 0) colour values on the monitor (and recognized as such by the colour pipette), because every CMYK-area coverage that is more than 300% is automatically converted into zero values in red, green and blue, in a linear calculation into RGB, even when many nuances still exist in these dark areas in CMYK.

 

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