A modern color picker built for designers and developers, that allows you to collect, organize and edit colors. It gives you the ability to share colors with everyone and link them between the other tools in your workflow. The Harrington family are a top-notch dealer for large format inkjet printers in the local Seattle market. They are generously hosting this free educational event for their customers and anyone who is interested in learning more about printing, photography and color management.

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Apple Mac Colors

• Oct 19, 2019

  
  ColorThink, our venerable color graphing and diagnosing tool, has been available in one form or another since August 2000 and has users in over 90 countries. We continue to develop updates for the current releases and have also been working on a significant upgrade for some time.
  Our plan has been to have a 4.x upgrade before macOS Catalina (10.15) was released. Apple's new macOS has removed the ability to run 32-bit applications entirely; while you can run them in VM environments like Parallels or VMware, it's a pain, and something we like to avoid.
  Unfortunately software development is something that rarely goes to plan, and the new ColorThink hotness is not ready in time for Catalina. We're very excited about it and have been adding features and technologies developed in our other tools as well as new capabilities not seen anywhere else.
  We were faced with the decision between having our great users wait until the new software is ready (see above re: software development delays) or do some retrospective development by rolling up our sleeves and pushing to get the current version (or a feature-equivalent version) running happily in 64 bits and on Catalina. The number of people who have leapt onto Catalina immediately after it shipped has been surprising (and a little alarming to cautious-upgrade me), and we've been receiving emails and calls about a Catalina-compatible version.
  We decided it was important to support our faithful users and industry friends, so we've chosen to release ColorThink Pro 3.0.8 for 64-bit. This has feature parity with the 32-bit version you currently use and should behave the same way as much as possible. Windows users will still run the 32-bit version and we expect to release a 64-bit version for Windows in the 4.x release cycle. ColorThink 2 users (non Pro) will have to wait a bit longer as we're still determining how best to bring them into the 64-bit world.
  We're creating and testing builds regularly and have now made ColorThink Pro 3.0.8 64-bit available for beta testing. You can download it from the ColorThink download page. PLEASE check out the ReadMe notes with each new beta version to see the known issues (things you may notice that don't need reporting) and also please let us know about the things that need fixing. We understand there may be some outstanding issues from 3.0.7 that have not been addressed in 3.0.8 64-bit but our plan and priority is to create feature parity as much as possible.
  Thanks everyone for your patience and for using ColorThink for almost 20 years!
  Steve
  
• Sep 11, 2019

  
  

  If you are in the State of Washington in early October, make plans on coming to the:

  
  

  JVH Digital Festival

  October 3, 2019
  Bellevue Washington

  The Harrington family are a top-notch dealer for large format inkjet printers in the local Seattle market. They are generously hosting this free educational event for their customers and anyone who is interested in learning more about printing, photography and color management. Pat Herold of CHROMiX will be one of the speakers, teaching a beginner's session on color management.

  The JVH festivals are always fun, worthwhile events - packed with practical information for the small photography or printing business. If you are in Washington, you don't want to miss this!

  You can even enter your printed artwork or photography in the print contest.

  The event is free, but please contact them to register ahead of time.

  http://www.jvhtech.com/festival.php
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  
• Aug 05, 2019

  
  

  Our friend Jeff Collins,
  and another friend, Mike Todryk, of IWCO Direct have a great discussion on how Mike was able to take a company with an enormous variety of printing devices & technologies, and transform it so that they know where their color is, they have their color under control, and they maintain a 'shared neutral appearance' - through the wonder of G7. Mike shares details about the software they used, and what they did to improve procedures for saving time, money and hitting industry standard color. A special bonus near the end includes the mistakes that brand owners commonly make when communicate color to printers.

  https://www.buzzsprout.com/episodes/iwco-direct-the-benchmark-of-a-process-control-culture
  

  
  

  Mike Todryk elegantly walks through what anyone would describe as THE absolute benchmark process control company - across (3) facilities, (13) Continuous Web Litho Presses, (10) Continuous Web Inkjet Presses, (10) Flexo Presses, (3) Digital EP Presses, (2) Sheetfed Offset Presses, (3) Contract Proofers - maintained by (4) in-house G7® Experts.

• Jul 02, 2019

  
  For years this blog has been proudly telling our profiling secrets to all who would listen. One of the policies that makes for a better profile, for certain papers and fabrics, is the use of polarized measurements. Our president, Steve Upton, has been hammering on the instrument makers for years to please include polarizing capability into their new instruments. One company that had seemed deaf to our pleas has been X-Rite.
  

  
  

  Turns out, maybe they were listening after all! X-Rite recently announced a new i1Pro: The i1Pro 3 Plus. This model is made specifically to take measurements of textiles and other unusual materials. Important features include:

  -Polarization filter that enables the instrument to take M3 measurements

  -A larger, 8mm aperture to get better sampling of fabric patterns

  -The instrument can support transmission scanning for backlit film.
  

  -The IO table has been updated to support this new i1Pro 3 Plus, and now enables measuring backlit materials.
  The new i1Pro 3 Plus and the new IO table are slated to be available in July, 2019.
  X-Rite press release on i1Pro 3 Plus

  
  

  
  
• Jun 10, 2019

  
  

  
  

  Microsoft recently announced that they are in development of a new Xbox gaming console. Those who hang on these news items scoured the daily videos prior to the announcement, to see if Microsoft gave any advanced clues. In the videos were screen elements that looked like 'R 255' 'G 86' and such. It turns out they were leaving a clue about the internal code name for the new gaming console: It's called 'Scarlett' and the RGB values they left as a clue were: 255, 36, 0.
  How about that?! A color enthusiast can be one step ahead of his friends when it comes to guessing code names of upcoming gaming consoles!
  

  If you are a card-carrying color geek, you probably already know that you do not define the color scarlet merely using the RGB numbers 255, 36, 0. RGB numbers are merely device values and don't in themselves describe a color unless they are accompanied by a printing condition or profile. (In a similar way, the number '4' on a toaster does not by itself tell you what color toast you're going to get.)

  We can certainly make an educated guess, that because Microsoft was involved in the original creation of the color space: 'sRGB', that they are intending to use that color space - and in fact that does define the color scarlet, according to Wikipedia.

  However, the illustration below shows that 255, 36, 0 in the ProPhotoRGB color space for example, is a much more saturated color than 255, 36, 0 in sRGB. It's always a good policy to define your terms!

  
  

  
  

  
  

Mac Color Management App Free

If you work with color on the Mac, you’re probably painfully aware that the macOS Colors palette hasn’t changed in years. It offers several different types of color pickers, an eyedropper tool for sampling a color from the screen, and wells for storing color swatches. It’s functional for occasional use but becomes clumsy quickly—try remembering which red is which when you’ve saved multiple similar versions. Many graphics apps offer their own color tools, but they’re useless as soon as you need to work in another app. Luckily, there’s a solution: Sip.

Project Management App Mac

Sip is a $10 menu bar app that allows you to pick colors anywhere on your Mac, quickly organize them into palettes, and smartly use those colors in other apps. Brothers André Gonçalves and Rui Aureliano designed Sip with advanced features for professional developers and designers, but its core functionality is simple enough that any Mac user might find it useful for color management.

Sip Basics

The first thing you’ll do with Sip is pick some colors. You can open the color picker—which is a circle that magnifies a small portion of the screen underneath it—by clicking the menu bar icon or pressing a keyboard shortcut (Command-Control-Option-P). Sip provides plenty of shortcuts, all of which you can change in its settings.

To pick a color, position the color picker over the desired hue, wherever on the screen it may be, and click. That adds the color to Sip and copies it to your clipboard. Press a modifier key while picking a color to add additional tweaks:

• Shift: Adds multiple colors in a row.
• Option: Automatically creates a new palette and puts each color you pick in that palette (more on palettes shortly).
• Control: Creates a new palette with the colors you’re picking.
• Command: Sends the color directly to the app in which you’re working, if it’s one of the 17 currently supported apps, including Web development apps like Coda and Espresso, and Adobe’s Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.

For more precise color picking, use Sip’s keyboard shortcuts to increase or decrease the zoom of the color picker, to make the color picker’s grid larger or smaller, and to move the color picker around in 1- or 10-pixel increments. This is great for grabbing a 1-pixel border color or the color of small text.

You can also send colors to Sip directly from Sketch or Photoshop using the Sip shortcuts for Get Border Color or Get Fill Color. Clicking the color wheel in the top right of the menu bar window opens a Photoshop-like color editor where you can pick a color or enter hexadecimal or RGBA values.

Once you have some colors in Sip, you’ll probably want to create palettes to keep them organized. You might want a palette for brand colors, another for a project you’re working on, and a few more for colors that inspire you.

Mac Color Management App Software

To create your first palette, click the hamburger menu in the menu bar window and then choose New Palette. All the colors you’ve picked so far will already be in your color history. Drag colors from your color history into your new palette. You can also drag to rearrange the colors within any palette.

Control-clicking the palette gives you options to rename, duplicate, lock, or favorite it. Favorites are helpful once you have a bunch of palettes. Clicking the heart in the bottom left of the menu bar dropdown will show only your favorite palettes.

Clicking the name of the palette takes you into a list view of all the colors in that palette. Sip automatically generates names for your colors like Sunglow or Blue Haze, but you can Control-click any color in the list view to rename it. I like naming my colors by use case, such as Background, Highlight, Header Text, and Body Text. Control-clicking any color in the list also provides options to delete, replace, or edit the color with a Photoshop-like color editor.

Best Free Apps For Mac

Once you’ve organized your colors into palettes, you can begin using them in other apps. Selecting any color from your history or a palette in the menu bar window copies the color to your clipboard. Sip can also show a draggable color dock on the edge of your screen; you can define which of your palettes appear in this dock. Selecting a color in the color dock works the same as the menu bar window.

Your color palettes, color history, and settings sync between Macs, and Sip automatically backs them up by taking snapshots that are saved locally in case you accidentally delete something.

Sip Formats

If you find yourself using different color formats in different apps, like hexadecimal in Photoshop and CSS RGBA in Sublime Text, Sip has you covered. You can turn on Smart Formats, define which format is used with each app, or simply use the presets. With Smart Formats on, when you paste colors from Sip into an app, it will automatically use the correct color format.

I’ve never had to create a custom format, but if the list of built-in formats lacks something you need, you can create your own based on any of the existing formats or from scratch. You’ll find the Custom Format editor within the hamburger menu in the menu bar window. It allows you to define separately how the color is saved to your clipboard, viewed in the menu, and viewed in the picker.

Sip Accessibility Tools

Sip’s Check Contrast feature helps you make sure that the contrast of the colors you are using is accessible to people with low vision. To check contrast, choose Check Contrast from the hamburger menu. Then pick a background color and text color. Sip will provide a numeric score as well as an overall grade of AAA (great!), AA (acceptable contrast for type smaller than 18 point), A Large (acceptable for type larger than 18 point), or Fail.

While I was using this feature to take screenshots for this article, Sip showed me that a white-on-seafoam color combination I was using on my Web site wasn’t accessible. I was able to make a simple color change to my site, and now it’s more usable for people with low vision.

Mac Apps Download

Taking a Sip

Mac Management Software

You can try Sip for free for 15 days. After the free trial ends, you’ll need to purchase the app.

Sip uses a pricing model popularized by the design app Sketch. It costs $10 for one year of app updates on one computer. If you want to license more than one computer, you’ll receive a discounted rate: $8 each for 2–5 computers, $7 each for 6–9 computers, $6 each for 10–19 computers, or $5 each for 20 or more computers. Once the first year is up, you can purchase another year of updates for half the cost of your first year, or you can keep using the version of the app you’re currently using for no extra cost.

Mac Color Management

If you’ve struggled with color management between apps, Sip is well worth the price, and it’s easy to test the trial version to see if it will improve your workflow. I know it has improved mine.