Indigo

Here's blue:

Top is Indigo.
Bottom is claimed to be natural indigo in an Iranian new production Kirman.

Best regards,
Vincent

Blue???? On my monitor the bottom one looks brownish-red.

Hi Marvin,

My screen gives: Brownish/purple/green

Strange isn't it?
Must be a messy "natural" indigo.

Best regards,
Vincent

Hi Guys

It looks brownish red on my monitor, too.

I assume that the same image information is going to my computer, Marvin's and Vincent's. If the colors on our monitors are different, it has to be because the graphics systems (video card + monitor) aren't displaying the same information the same way. It isn't because the dye is natural (messy or otherwise), it's because our monitors or video drivers are calibrated to different standards.

Regards,

Steve Price

Hi Steve,

Yep, that's the problem.
On the other hand, the indigo is blue/green, isn't it?
I don't think that playing with these images help a lot. And it didn't give the result that I had expected because if I say in the salon that natural dyes are more impure (in pure color) I expected the natural colors to give more shades to the left and right in the colorspectrum.
But the brownish/red in the last image could be the result of acids used for a better distrubution of the chemical indigo............
Oooh, what have I started

All the natural color images I have are all done under the same conditions. Daylight, distance and white backgrounds. I'll try to do the trick with madder, cochenille etc.
And I have a synthetic colorsample card of wool. I'll do the same.
It's fun to see the outcome.
It's like investigating what the eyes see, but what the brains can't handle. Too much info at the same time.
If I where a spider......da, di, da, da, da, di, da, da, didle, didle, dom.

Best regards,
Vincent.

ps. Does a spider see colors with all is eyes?
I don't know.

Hi Vincent

The upper part of the image looks approximately black on my monitor.

I don't know whether spiders see color. Remember, we don't always see color; in dim light the rods do the sensing (cones aren't sensitive enough), and there is no color information in rod vision.

There, that should set you off.

Regards

Steve Price

Blue?

On my computer, there are only small boxes with a red "X" in them!

Patrix Weilex

My system must be configured correctly because I see what Vincent describes – before he changed to “Messy”, that is.
Remember that Macs are much more reliable than PCs, as far as color is concerned (and not only color, I’m afraid).
First, they don’t have to cope with a multitude of different models of graphic cards and monitors, as the PCs.
Then the Macs come equipped with a graphic card that automatically corrects the “gamma”. (What is “gamma”? That’s another story…)

quote:

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On the other hand, the indigo is blue/green, isn't it?

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Hi Filiberto

Remember that Macs are much more reliable than PCs, as far as color is concerned (and not only color, I’m afraid).

I think your sources are badly out of date on this topic.

As for the colors on Vincent's image, I cropped out two sections of it and looked at the Red-Green-Blue values in a Photoshop Elements histogram. The one that looks reddish brown on my monitor has approximately equal proportions of blue and green, and about 1.4 times as much red as either of them; the one that looks black on my monitor has approximately equal amounts of all three. That is, the colors in the image files display the way you'd expect them to on the PC I use at home and the one I use at work, as well as on Marvin's. Your Mac and Vincent's are both displaying them without enough red in the mix.

Just thought you'd want to know - maybe the Mac folks will let you download the latest drivers or tell you how to correct the colors manually.

Regards

Steve Price

Greetings-

For those of us who obscess about color, and who utilize programs like Photoshop, there is a tool available for calibrating your monitor for color accuracy. Professionals use such programs about once a month. An example of this software can be seen at:
http://www.pantone.com/products/products.asp?idSubArea=0&idArea=2&showNav=31&idArticle=703

Regards,

Fred Mushkat

Hi Steve,

I don’t use a Mac but a PC. Always did.
Actually we have two PCs at home (different brands and graphic cards).
Vincent’s “blues” look almost the same on both (a little darker on my son’s computer, but that is the setting he prefers on his monitor). As we cannot compare what we see and we rely only on verbal descriptions, I doubt we can go very far.

But Fred’s idea of calibrating monitors is a good one. I’ll look for some freeware, though.
Regards,

Filiberto

Hi Steve,

If you see more red, your white dot correction is set on more yellow (D50). So I've changed my screen again.
Wow, the image gets darker and darker.
And....Turkotek grey gets more pinkish, less silver.

Best regards,
Vincent

Hi Vincent,

Since this is an INDIGO thread and not a hardware maintenance thread, I thought I'd post this image for you. You can play with it, but also appreciate it. It's from the book "Indigo" by Jenny Balfour-Paul. Captioned as "Woolen sample showing shades achievable using only indigo and yellow weld. Dyed by Margaret Redpath for 'Renaissance Dyeing',Wales, in 1998".

Enjoy:



Regards,
Chuck

__________________
Chuck Wagner

Hi Chuck,

This can't be only Indigo and yellow weld.
She must have used alum, copper, potassium, iron, tin, or whatever to get these results.
And how many failures before she got these results?
Their goes a lot of hard work in dying wool with natural pigments. It isn't easy like pee in a pot every morning and see the color yellow! "Where's my wool!"

Best regards,
Vincent

Sorry, hardware again

Dear all,

Calibrating colors generally involves modifying the gamma correction of (preferably) the graphic card and creating a new color profile (.icm file) for the monitor.

Last time I messed with it I had to spend more than a week exchanging mails with Agfa technical support because my scanner started turning out very odd colors.

Eventually, with some lateral thinking (or you can call it sheer luck) I found the solution myself.

Now I don’t want to mess it up again so, instead of looking for color calibration programs, I found a couple of web pages with which one can roughly check his system. Nothing sophisticated, suffice to look at a few images.

Of course, this isn’t by any means a professional approach, but it’s better than nothing and it’s free, SIMPLE and quick.

http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php

http://pages.prodigy.net/ecmorris/tips/monitor.htm

My monitor seems all right, I didn’t have to adjust anything.
What about yours?
Regards,

Filiberto

Hi Filiberto

My monitor checks out OK, too, on those pages.

This seems pretty strange to me. The color I see on Vincent's lower sample of indigo is decidedly reddish brown, and resembles those on the bottom row of the samples Chuck Wagner posted. Running its color histogram in Photoshop Elements confirms that red is the predominant color in the Red-Green-Blue group.

Marvin's verbal description of Vincent's sample is the same as mine, approximately. Vincent describes it as brownish purple green; you say that's what it looks like to you, too. Are we using different words for the same thing? That seems unlikely, but the whole thing isn't making much sense.



Regards

Steve Price

Hi Steve,

Are we using different words for the same thing?

Probably. And English isn’t my language, nor Vincent’s.

At the end, may be “reddish brown” and “brownish purple” could be the same. With same spots of green, though.

Regards,

Filiberto