CC3+ changing my colors again...

I started a new color wash map the other day, my country for the guild world project at the CG. (I promise I will start one for the pf atlas too) I just wanted to get it started, and to post something so that the guild could see that I had actually started it, even though most of the work won't be done until after the holidays.

I got as far as my land mass, color tinting the oceans, mountains , seas, lakes, and rivers, before I rendered it out. And then I noticed a problem. The color wash that I chose for my seas/lakes/rivers was different from the one I chose. It's like the program changed the color before rendering.

I've had this happen once before since I started using the software, back when I was making my Meridyan challenge map. The text color I had chosen at the time kept changing when I rendered out the map. Now it's doing it again.

I don't think we ever figured out why it happened, in my Meridyan map... so I'm hoping we can figure it out this time, and figure out how to fix it, so I have the colors I choose.

Comments

  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    I don't really know why this might be happening, as I have never experienced anything like this myself, but are any specific color numbers in the palette this keep happening with? Are you using a custom palette, and is it attached to the map?

    Could you attach a map file that this happens with, as well as a screenshot of how the map is supposed to look and a render with the problematic result? Being able to try the render myself, and knowing exactly what you see helps tremendously.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    I'm sorry Storm. I know you were trying to ask me about this earlier on Discord. I'm having certain system and broadband problems atm (Mostly Windows 10 related, not Linux), and I wasn't able to help.

    Thinking about it, if you are changing colours in the palette to get the exact shade of blue that you want, then you need to save the palette by clicking the colour swatch in the top bar (sorry about the lack of proper terminology, I'm really tired as well), click the save palette button, and then also alter the settings of the file to attach the palette to the file, so that it doesn't revert all the time.

    I'm only guessing that's the problem.

    I expect Remy will have it all sorted out quite quickly :)
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    If you're doing custom palettes, then avoid colors 16-20 and color 31. Those colors have special meaning with regards to how the UI renders. FastCAD resets colors 16-20 to the operating system colors at startup. This auto-reset is one of the reasons that some list boxes in windows 10 had a very pale grayish color for their selection color.

    I haven't checked, but there is also a chance that the custom palette from a symbol catalog may override custom palette in the current drawing when you load a new catalog.
  • edited December 2017
    my symbols are all in black and white. I'm not changing grey scale black or white colors.

    This happened last time with my greens, and now it's happening with my blues.

    I do have a screen shot, so I will post the screen shot, the rendering, and the fcw... but be warned, I'm using one of Mouse's parchments, so if you don't have it, all you will see is the red x. Oh, and you will have to activate sheet effects. mine keeps turning off for some reason.
  • oh, and the color on my fcw... that's something completely different altogether!
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    The difference is only very slight compared to what I was expecting.

    Is your screen set up with the default colour profile that it had when you took it out of the box, or have you adjusted it at some point to make it less 'yellow'?
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    edited December 2017
    Even an adjustment to the contrast or brightness can have a similar effect.

    When I'm using Windows my screen is set up for 'night light' which is much more yellow than normal. It helps prevent eye strain. I have to remember that its on, though, because as soon as I export a jpg from CC3+ the colours are far more blue than I can see them on the screen in CC3+. That's the other way around to your situation. That's why I think you have a 'cold' or 'blue' setting on your screen.

    Its a bit difficult to explain, but your screen is not an accurate representation of how it will look when you export it and open the jpg.

    I had a similar problem with Gymnopus P. The red of the exported map was completely different to the red on the screen when I was working on the map. That's because I had accidentally turned the colour profile to 'cold'
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    For changes that subtle, I think that Loopysue is right about color profile differences. The CC3+ color space is whatever the default Windows GDI system gives you. The exported files may be in sRGB color space, depending on type. One way to check is to export a BMP file, a JPEG file, and a PNG file of the same scene. The BMP should be indistinguishable from the onscreen version, while the PNG and JPEG versions may be like what you're seeing above.
  • I haven't changed any color settings anywhere, EXCEPT when I'm creating a 'custom color' in cc3+. Every color palette I have on my laptop is factory standard.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    edited December 2017
    I was talking about the adjustments to the screen, which isn't anything to do with CC3+. In Win 10, If you right click your desktop you will see an option called "Graphics properties...". This allows people to alter the contrast, brightness, sharpness, and colour balance of their display screen.

    If you have ever changed those from the factory default for your screen (which I am assuming you may have done to help with your astigmatism), then it most likely won't be showing you the truth when you are looking at the map in CC3+

    Joe's method of exporting it as several different bitmap types and comparing the result will probably be most helpful...

    Its actually 2 different problems. Screen set up, and differences in colour profile when exporting from CC3+ in different file formats. jpg is notoriously bad for colour accuracy. Try png or bmp :)
  • I have been thinking about this. Earlier this year I was having computer problems everytime I booted up. I noticed my color selection and my maps changed, for about 2 weeks then it stopped, I had to reload default PAL.

    CC3/CC3Plus hadn't been updated, but I had gotten some of the Win 10 forced updates. Then the problem stopped. This would have been back in October or November, 2017.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    That was around the time of the Fall Creator's Update - the one that caused me to go Linux.

    I now have a dual boot system: Win 10 / Linuxmint 18.3.

    Currently I'm on Linux, but I was over on Windows this morning when I made that last comment. I can't see any obvious differences in colour between the two systems.

    I am extremely colour sensitive - its part of my autism ;)
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    edited December 2017
    Posted By: LadieStormI haven't changed any color settings anywhere, EXCEPT when I'm creating a 'custom color' in cc3+. Every color palette I have on my laptop is factory standard.
    I'm probably misunderstanding the problem (yet again), so please bear with me for a moment. If I understand correctly, you are changing one of the colors in the CC3+ palette, and then saving that palette as part of the drawing. Everything shows as you expect onscreen. Then you export the image as some format and the output looks different from what you saw on the screen, correct? In the above example, it's a moderately small shift in color values like a light teal to near aqua. You never see a radical shift like red to green, right?

    I mentioned color spaces earlier. That's only part of the problem (color is actually a hard problem in computers because of how things were handled historically and how devices are constructed). There is this abstract ideal "device" that shows abstract ideal "images" that is perceived by an ideal "human" observer. Ideally, every device can show every color that humans can perceive. Every real display device, though, has a range of colors that it can actually display called its color gamut; this color gamut usually shows many fewer colors than humans can actually perceive. Every real image also has a color gamut associated with it (explicitly or implicitly). When your computer shows a real image on a real device like a monitor or printer, it has to map the image's color gamut to the device's color gamut using what's called a transfer function. That's where uglies start to creep in. If the computer doesn't know what the color capabilities of your display device are (for example, it's a generic monitor or the calibration is off), then when it tries to map from one color gamut to another, it will make mistakes and some colors will shift a bit.

    Some image formats have the option to embed a color space into the image format. BMP files don't have this capability, so the display color mapping engine in your system will use the default mapping, which should be whatever happens onscreen. JPEG can embed a color profile, and if the image embeds a color profile that doesn't match the one currently in effect on the system, it may cause color shifts when viewed with a viewer that understands such things. It's also possible that a viewer can make assumptions about what the system "should have done" and try to correct things on its own. I suspect that what's happening here is that the color space used for screen, which is why I suggested making a quick export for BMP and for JPEG and comparing them. If you would like to eliminate the image viewer as a suspect, try inserting the exported image back into CC3 and see if it has the same displayed colors as the rest of the drawing.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    Geees! That's a bit like the old question "How do I know if the colour I see as 'red' is the same colour that you are seeing when you look at the same thing"

    Nice test, though, Joe :)
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    edited December 2017
    The answer to that question about color is that we pointed to the same physical item and agreed that its color is "red". The hardware underlying our perceptions is different, but the training is what allows us to discuss individual colors.

    The fun part is that human color vision is based on color perception in three distinct spectral bands based on three types of receptor cells in the eye (thus, three primary colors). The center of sensitivity for each primary provably varies from person to person, which can account for variations in opinion about "how red" something is. Also, because of how the genes for those receptors are carried, there are certain women who actually have four different type of receptors and so can perceive a slightly different range of colors than others.

    There are also linguistic issues. If you don't have words for particular colors, then you probably won't be able to distinguish those colors individually. A fun discussion can be had when talking about the ancient Greeks and their relationship to the color "blue". Start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue (search for "Greek" on that page) and then proceed onward.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    I just thought of something, Storm...

    I know you want to get this right for the sake of your map and personal satisfaction, but if its any comfort the ocean is erased when the land is added to the world map. There's just one slate grey ocean around everything.
  • Posted By: LoopysueGeees! That's a bit like the old question "How do I know if the colour I see as 'red' is the same colour that you are seeing when you look at the same thing"

    Nice test, though, Joe :)
    One of my childhood buddies and I used to discuss this, we gave up... at that time we hadn't learned about the color spectrum in accordance with the electromagnetic spectrum.

    But I do still wonder every once in a long while about this very thing.
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    edited December 2017
    Posted By: LadieStormoh, and the color on my fcw... that's something completely different altogether!
    What did you mean by this? Don't your colors match the screenshot you took? As discussed above, color profiles is a messy thing, but a screenshot shown on the same monitor as it was taken should generally look like the thing you took a screenshot of.
  • if you look at the fcw I attached, look at the screen shot, then look at the rendered image... there are three different colors for the sea/lakes/rivers. And just so you know... the sea, the lakes, and the rivers are supposed to be the same color. The color in the screen shot is the color that is supposed to be there. The color in the current fcw is what my map looked like after I had closed the program, and opened it again on a different day. The color that appears in the rendering is somewhere between the two.

    And Sue, even with my stigmatism, the only thing I've changed on my defaults, is the contrasting brightness.
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    Try two things (not necessarily at the same time):

    1. Change the screen settings back to default just for a few minutes and look again at your FCW in CC3. See what colour it is. Greens and blues are highly susceptible to adjustments in contrast and brightness, and a blue can become a green (or indeed vice-versa) depending on what those settings are.

    Separately to the above test.......

    2. Export the map as a .png, and then as a .bmp :)
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    Monitor color adjustments shouldn't make any difference in the screen captures unless those captures are being done with an external photographic device. Color space conversions that are done by an image viewer will result in changes to the RGB pixels in the screen buffer and those can be captured with a simple software screen grab.

    I downloaded the fcw file and looked at it. I don't have the textures, so it looked very different from what you're showing here, but the colors looked consistent for land and sea. I tried LIST on the various entities and they all showed color 70, which matched having the same colors.

    I then exported a BMP file and a JPG file from CC3+ at 3000x3000 with antialias 5%. I looked at both files in the Window image viewer and they were visually indistinguishable from each other and from the visible data in CC3+. This behavior suggests that the CC3+ export process isn't adding unexpected color transformations, or at least not any that show on my machine. I then loaded the BMP and JPG into Photoshop and made a difference image between them and saw only the expected JPEG artifacts as differences, so I believe that the base RGB pixels values are the same for the different kinds of file exports.

    It's possible that using the background texture could be causing color shifts, but I don't know how that would be happening differently for screen as compared to export because they use the same path. The only thing that's different between the onscreen display and an exported file is the processing that ImageMagick performs for JPEG and PNG files. They ended up looking the same on my machine, but that may be due to monitors and calibration (I have some ancient low-end TN monitor with pretty bad color reproduction, but I have the current drivers for them and have calibrated them a few times in the past).

    In short, I'm not sure what's causing the color shifts you showed above. Does it do this for all of the low-saturation blue colors on your CC3+ exports (that is, with different drawings)?
  • MonsenMonsen Administrator 🖼️ 46 images Cartographer
    edited December 2017
    As with Joe, I can't see any difference in the renders and the file in CC3+. I didn't have the parchment either though, so I just replaced it by a different one.

    Posted By: LadieStormThe color in the current fcw is what my map looked like after I had closed the program, and opened it again on a different day.
    This may be the case if you updated the palette, and didn't re-attach the updated version. When you attach a palette to a drawing in CC3+, it is the palette at that time that is attached, not future updates, so if you later change any colors, you must attach it again to store the updated colors, otherwise it will simply use the old palette attached to the map next time you open it.
    Also, if you do NOT attach the palette to the map, then it will use the palette on disk, so if you changed colors in another map (and save the palette [as opposed to attaching it, which is a separate thing]) then your map will use the current palette on disk the next time you open it, which will not be the same palette as last time if you modified it (and saved it) in another map in between.
  • sorry, I've been overwhelmingly busy that last couple of days. I realized that there are a couple of questions that I never did answer... so let me do that now.

    jslayton - no, the colors do not switch from red to green. the shifts stay within the palette wheel. And when this color shift occurs, it usually only occurs on one specific color. For this map, it's the steel blue of the sea/lakes/rivers. It' supposed to be a grayish blue with just the barest hint of green. Not aqua, not teal. I was afraid any blue with strong green undertones would clash with the deep blue of the ocean.

    On my Meridyan map where this happened before... it was my text. It was supposed to be a soft, mint green, and for the longest time it kept shifting to a bright, neon yellow/green.

    One thing I have noticed... is that when this color shift occurs... it switches from a light, muted pastel to something darker, and bolder. Does that mean anything to anyone?

    I've also noticed that the color numbers don't change, even though the shade or saturation may change slightly. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?
  • LoopysueLoopysue ProFantasy 🖼️ 39 images Cartographer
    I'm not pretending to understand what's going on, but you could try changing the blue on your map to a more ultramarine blue (round the circle towards indigo and away from yellow), and see if it comes out the right colour?

    Not a long term solution, but maybe a remedy for the time being?
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