Why do gel colors differ from link-to colors?

I have a square on a magic sheet set to link to channel color.  I select the square and set its color with the gel picker to R347.  The color swatch on the gel picker looks similar to the Rosco gel, but the color on the magic sheet square is totally different.  The Color Picker shows the color similar to the magic sheet color (also incorrect).  R347 has considerably more blue than I am seeing on either the magic sheet square or the color picker.  The Gel picker shows a very different color, which is approximately correct for R347. 

This happens for other colors as well (e.g. R358, R310, R348), some but not all.  In most cases, the color picker seems to match the magic sheet, not the gel picker.  (i.e. wrong too)  What am I doing wrong?  I tried making the base color in the magic sheet white, black, and various colors in between, but nothing seems to make the magic sheet match the gel picker.  The instrument is patched as a D40 Vivid. 

I realize the colors cannot match the gel exactly, but these are not even close.  I'm willing to live with the colors in the gel picker; they're close enough.


Note: The color picker shows these colors for R347: Red 100, Red-Oran 24, Amber 0, Green 0, Cyan 0, Blue 0, Indigo 22, Hue 330, Sat 71  (It looks to me like the hue should be closer to 265 than 330.)

  • I agree with Rick. There are some colors in Magic sheets that are horribly wrong. Rick cites many examples so I will only give two: L203 appears in the Magic sheet as a Pale Gold (similar to R08 or R09); and R37 appears as a Salmon (similar to L790). I know it is not my screen; it appears this way on 5 different screens, and when I use Virtual Magic Sheet all colors appear correct. Furthermore, if I create a rectangle in Magic Sheet and fill it with the RGB Hexadecimal equivalent of the color the object appears correct. There is a website with a link to an excel file that has hex values for most gels from Rosco, Lee, and Gam. It is:
    http://www.derekleffew.com/referencedocumentsandwebsites
    It would be great if ETC could correctly match the colors with the correct hex values. In the short term, does anyone know if there is a way for us to directly entire the hex (or correct R/G/B) values into the color definitions?
  • It's even worse... on my theatre's Gio, L203 appears as Pale Gold on my fixture output!!!
    basically , as I described in my "questions" thread, all gels got a "RGB value shift" with new software release! If you ask me, I couldn't care less how the gel's color apperes on Gio's screens (regardless of "white paper backgr." or "tungsten lamp" interpretation), cause there are other ways to label the damn thing in M.S..... but it bothers me a lot when I don't get what I expect out of my fixtures... :(
    I wonder why did they go to "fix a thing that was not broken", cause gels (and their on screen appearance) were quite o.k. in the previous softwer versinions...
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