carol.gimp.org

Crayola Colors, Scanned on Epson Perfection 610 Scanner

One of my favorite color web pages is this one in which crayola crayons were applied to paper and then scanned in as an image file and colorpicked.

It is also a color table. I reproduced the table on this web site.

Technically, you should be able to take a color from that html table, look it up on the table in the scanner driver and determine the CIELab equivelent with this information.

The following example has nothing to do with the problem with print profiles directly, except that I think the problems with the different software applications and how they read and apply color information are going to be similar. I simply wanted to make the html chart of the colors into a GIMP palette.

Hidden in the html of that table is a number and a name that is associated with the number. For example, #0071CD and Cerulian. A GIMP Palette with the same information is " 0 113 205 cerulian" no html, no commas. Also, I did not use capital letters when I made the palette.

There are several ways to strip the html from a file like this, convert the 6 digit number to the r, g, b tuplet. I did not use any of those ways when making this GIMP Palette. I used the gimp color picker and picked from the web page. It probably took less time to do this than to work with the html file.

Crayola Colors for printing on a Tektronix Phaser printer

I found mention of a Crayola color table in dvips. I found this different Crayola color table.

Once again, this is a great color table; I put a copy of it here as well. It tells the color, the name of the color and it tells the devices used to make and print the colors.

I was faced with additional challenges turning this file into a GIMP Palette. If "Cerulian" had been in this table, it would have been the name and a number in this format: "1 .45 0 .2" I ended up using one of TheGIMP's color dialogs to make the palette of this new set of crayola colors.

Comparison of Color Tables

The scanner saw a different color of red than the printer did, apparently. I tend to believe the color from the epson scanner more. It is difficult to believe that any printer would so perfectly print the crayon color to be so precisely red.

This is the color problem; and we have not done any math yet.