Has anybody had any luck with matching colors anywhere near what the color picker is suggesting? Where has the color picker gone? I’m finding the color is WAY off. Is there supposed to be a recipe book in the kit, because I bought two and there was no book in either? The only way I could even find the color picker was one obscure link half way down this blog post…now it doesn’t go anywhere…https://formlabs.com/blog/introducing-color-kit/
You can scroll a bit further down that web page to find the color picker. Can you share some of your results (target color, what you actually got, with photos)? Colors can be really sensitive when you are adding small amounts of one color to another, so it’s important to measure accurately. A scale can help do a better job than you can with syringes.
Hi
The color picker link did not work yesterday, although its working again now…the page would not scroll down enough to show the picker…
Ive attached actual and color picker recommendations for the “orange” I was trying to produce. Sorry for the crappy phone image,…broken lens on my phone…but you should get the idea.
If its indeed that sensitive, we would need to know the density of the pigment…is it 1:1 with water?
If I try to salvage the entire tank of resin now committed to the wrong color by adding a few cc of magenta, will the resin fail to function in the printing process?
First, to clarify, what recipe yielded the resin in the photo? Was this print done with a CMYKW of (0, 17, 67, 0, 15) mL or was it something else since the picker was unavailable yesterday?
Comparing to our 16 recipes, your photo looks more like our “Peach” than anything else. Peach is CMYKW = (0, 3, 4, 0, 93) mL. Apricot (which is much closer to your color) is (0, 20, 80, 0, 0) mL, which isn’t far from the (0, 17, 67, 0, 15) mL your screenshot shows. This makes me think your recipe has very little magenta or yellow, and so a little more would pull the color toward what you want.
As for sensitivity, color mixing is particularly sensitive around white and using black (it doesn’t take much color to tint pure white to a color, and it doesn’t take much black to darken things). But around the orange you are going for, you should have a fair amount of leeway. You can click around on the color picker to get a sense of how the recipe changes for nearby colors.
While it’s not recommended, adding a little extra colorant beyond the recommended 100 mL will probably be OK.
I don’t have the density in front of me at the moment. I’ll see if I can find it. However, I don’t think you should need it.
Hi. It turns out the problem was OPERATOR ERROR!, In particular thinking the syringe was 100ml in volume even though it is clearly marked as 10ml, resulting in 10x LESS pigment being added. Adding the correct amount of pigment produced the desired orange color as per the color picker suggestion, and improved the print resolution to the normal level of sharpness.
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Glad/sorry to hear it. It makes me think a visual of the recipe visually showing all the full syringes would make that error less likely.
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While we are on the topic of color kit, I was wondering why I can not print a bright red. I figure it is because you start with a magenta pigment. I was wondering if I could get some ideas or input please?
Yes, as it turns out, color mixing for opaque liquids like paint and resin is surprisingly subtle. In fact, depending on your colorspace and illuminant, some hex values aren’t possible at all (as reflective colors) because white light doesn’t have enough red to hit #ff0000. (This is known as the MacAdam limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut .)
The picker tries to balance among hue, saturation, and lightness, so if you can’t match exactly, try less saturation and a more-neutral lightness. For example, it says the match is perfect at #C74040, which is darker and less saturated than #ff0000.
You are correct that any choice of a set of colorants produces a limited gamut: for mixing mostly-opaque liquids, any choice of color bases provides a limited gamut, as does the matte finish. This is the reason paint stores typically have more than a dozen colorants.
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