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I was once trying to match a colour from a logo in a PDF. Using the included 'DigitalColor Meter' that ships with Mac OS X. When displayed on the Macbook Pro s

I was once trying to match a colour from a logo in a PDF. Using the included 'DigitalColor Meter' that ships with Mac OS X. When displayed on the Macbook Pro screen it registered as one colour. On my Dell monitor it registered as something slightly different. When I used that the colour in CSS, the colour rendered differently to the original image, and DigitalColor Meter reported that there were different values between different browsers (Chrome and Safari) and different screens. And none of these visually matched the colour of the original image on either monitor. Not sure if it was gamma adjustment, colour calibration, drivers, graphics cards... in the end I gave up and did the best I could. I'm not sure why you'd want to buy a utility that replicates already built-in software, but one great value-add point would be to disentangle all of this nonsense.

jakejake 11y ago
I was going to say exactly this. Does anybody with a good understanding of monitor colors know why this happens & possibly how to deal with it?
adanmayer 11y ago
It's complicated :) but I try to explain: On OSX you can use AppKit and related frameworks to create an app or browser like Safari. All colors are subject to Color Management and are converted to your Display profile. So Safari takes CSS color values assumes they are in sRGB and converts them to your display profile. For Chrome and Firefox this is a different story. They use their own render engine so no conversion takes place here. This is the reason why colors differ between Safari and Chrome/Firefox. ColorSnapper recognizes if you pick from a Color Managed App and converts the color back to sRGB. There might be a slight difference because of rounding issues, but it's the best you can get. As for picking from PDFs or Adobe Photoshop: this depends on the app you are using (Preview App, Adobe Reader etc.) and if they have their own Color Management, but that is a little beyond this post. We will soon write a blog post about that on http://colorsnapper.com http://colorsnapper.com
- thedudemabry 11y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. I love focused products like this with a borderline insane attention to detail. I'm giving the free trial a shot right now.

jakejake 11y ago

I was going to say exactly this. Does anybody with a good understanding of monitor colors know why this happens & possibly how to deal with it?

adanmayer 11y ago

It's complicated :) but I try to explain: On OSX you can use AppKit and related frameworks to create an app or browser like Safari. All colors are subject to Color Management and are converted to your Display profile. So Safari takes CSS color values assumes they are in sRGB and converts them to your display profile. For Chrome and Firefox this is a different story. They use their own render engine so no conversion takes place here. This is the reason why colors differ between Safari and Chrome/Firefox. ColorSnapper recognizes if you pick from a Color Managed App and converts the color back to sRGB. There might be a slight difference because of rounding issues, but it's the best you can get. As for picking from PDFs or Adobe Photoshop: this depends on the app you are using (Preview App, Adobe Reader etc.) and if they have their own Color Management, but that is a little beyond this post. We will soon write a blog post about that on http://colorsnapper.com http://colorsnapper.com

thedudemabry 11y ago
Thanks for the explanation. I love focused products like this with a borderline insane attention to detail. I'm giving the free trial a shot right now.