How To Make Color Better in xLights
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- čas přidán 29. 01. 2023
- In this xLights Tutorial, I will show you how to use tools to unharness the power of xLights for color for your sequences.
Monday Minute
www.xTremeSequences.com
/ xtremesequencessyndicate - Zábava
you are my inspiration, my mentor, I have learned more about Xlights in just two of your videos than I have learned in looking at hundreds of videos on CZcams. thank you for your expertise and your willingness to share with others. let's turn the lights on and be creative.
That means the world to me, Frank. I'm glad to help.
Wowsers I truly never thought about this. Thank you for the great information 👍
Great job Ron. ❤
You sir, are a master of art and story telling at what you do!
You are far too kind. Thank you very much!
WOW! Great advice again. Thanks for sharing. I love the concept of “borrowing” the colors from the song or movie’s artwork. So smart!
💥BOOM!!!💥™
Thanks, John. Yes, it's really cool.
6:19 I usually just paste in the hex value, easier than RGB values individually, and the site you referenced for the pallets lets you copy it easily
Great to know!
Hey Ron, do you find yourself using Color Curves very often? I've only found very limited use, like doing a gradient blend over timing marks, for them but maybe I'm missing something.
Has anyone had issues with their pixels outputing the custom color and it looking nothing like what it looks like on your screen? I wanted a darker green and it came out like blueish green.
Are you using Gama 1.0? What brightness level are your lights set to?
@@xTremeSequences I have this same problem. What is Gama 1.0? Is that what should be used and how do you change it?
I’ve found several things that prevent the RGB LEDs from producing the color you expect:
1. At best, the pixels are nowhere near as good as any computer monitor. You have to settle for what they can do, not expect them to echo what you see in xLights.
2. If brightness is set too high, the colors will be washed out. Many of us run pixels at 30% power. That helps. Set this with “dimming curves” for your models in xLights layout.
3. Midrange brightness levels will be too high and colors washed out if you don’t increase gamma. Try going up from the default 1.0 to 2.2. Gamma compensates for our eyes’ nonlinear response. I actually use a gamma of 2.4 at 30% brightness to gain a little extra saturation. I remember how sick we felt when we got our first pixels. We spent a lot and they looked terrible. Brightness, gamma, and some finesse made a huge improvement.
4. The pixels don’t mix colors as predictably as the math suggests. Primary colors-red, green, blue-are not mixed. They use the RGB LEDs in the pixel separately, so their color is good and consistent, unless you go brighter than the LED can go by itself. That requires mixing one or both of the other LEDs to add brightness, which reduces saturation and color accuracy. Secondary colors-yellow, cyan, magenta-are mixed and work less well. You’ll have somewhat less consistency over the brightness range, but they’re still generally good. Tertiary colors-purple, orange, really any other hue-have a very limited useful range before they change or wash out, maybe only a range of 7 (decimal) or so. A change of 1-2 within the 0-255 range will noticeably alter these colors. You *can* get good tertiary colors, but you have to be careful. They work best at lower brightness levels.
I learned early to set up a controller and some pixel strings while sequencing. It’s very helpful to see the actual results on the pixels while developing a sequence, rather than getting surprises and disappointments at showtime. When you set effect colors this way, remember that your colors in the xLights preview windows will look wrong. We don’t care about the previews, though. It’s the actual pixels that count.