LEGO decoration swatches for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop

[BrokenEye]

A little something I threw together to make my life easier when creating custom LEGO decorations for LEGO Digital Designer.

These are color swatch sets for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, featuring all current brick colors (according to BrickLink), with black and white color corrected to match LDD's black and white. The Illustrator set is organized by catagory, and since the Photoshop swatch system doesn't allow for this, each catagory is its own set. Even though these are brick colors and not decoration colors, it seems to me that most decorations tend not to stray very far from this palette.

Download Illustrator Swatches

To install the Illustrator swatches, download the file and place it in "C:\Users\[YOUR NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [VERSION NUMBER] Settings\en_US\x64\Swatches". Once in Illustrator, open the Swatches window, and from the dropdown in the corner of the window choose "Open Swatch Library>User Defined>Lego Colors".

Download Photoshop Swatches

To install the Photoshop swatches, unzip the file and drop the *.ago files into "C:\Users\[YOUR NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop [VERSION NUMBER]\Presets\Color Swatches". Then go to the dropdown menu in the corner of the Swatches pane and select "Replace Swatches", and pick the one you want.

[Mylenium]

What CM settings are they based on, given that you mention correcting for on-screen display?

Mylenium

[BrokenEye]

51 minutes ago, Mylenium said:

What CM settings are they based on, given that you mention correcting for on-screen display?

Mylenium3

I'm sorry, that's not what I meant. I didn't correct for the on-screen display. I corrected for exactly two inaccuracies in how BrickLink's color guide displays the colors.

I didn't notice immediately, but Bricklink displays black and white as true black and true white (#000000 and #ffffff), which don't match the off-black and off-white shades I sampled from LDD's various decoration files (namely, #1b2a34 and #f4f4f4). #1b2a34 and #f4f4f4 also blend in seamlessly with the colors of bricks themselves in both LDD and LDD to POVRay Converter, which suggest that those also use these shades.

Considering the realism of LDD to POVRay Converter's renders, it seems very likely to me that the actual physical bricks also use #1b2a34- and #f4f4f4-colored plastic, though I can't think of any way to confirm this objectively. At least, not with the equipment I have.

[Mylenium]

Okay, so it's not really accurate either way.

Mylenium

[BrokenEye]

Not sure why you'd say that. I sampled the colors straight from the source.

[Mylenium]

13 hours ago, BrokenEye said:

Not sure why you'd say that.

Well, we could surely endlessly discuss the merits of color management for printing and the limited usefulness of 8bit hex values are, with no source profile no less, in this context... See the problem?

Mylenium

[BrokenEye]

No, not really. It's not as if I pulled the colors from a photograph or a scanned image. I just converted existing color swatches into a usable swatch plugin. What other display's color settings would I need to correct for when there's no other display involved?

[supertruper1988]

Thanks @BrokenEye! I will make good use of this! 

@Mylenium this isnt about printing or any other issue you have raised. It seems the goal is to simply match the colors that will turn out nicely with other LDD decorations. 

[Mylenium]

1 hour ago, supertruper1988 said:

It seems the goal is to simply match the colors that will turn out nicely with other LDD decorations. 

Not the point. If your monitor uses a specific color profile, the skewed colors are already baked into a screenshot, hence any such representation would look incorrect on other computers. That would even apply to a plain dumb sRGB profile as commonly assumed by most devices. It even matters for how the colors are transformed in the textures for the viewport shading. Point in case: If you do such stuff without proper CM, it's pretty much only valid on your own system. Don't get me wrong: It's better than nothing and most people won't care, but personally I'd be extremely wary to use this without knowing a few of these parameters.

Mylenium

[BrokenEye]

8 hours ago, Mylenium said:

Not the point. If your monitor uses a specific color profile, the skewed colors are already baked into a screenshot, hence any such representation would look incorrect on other computers. That would even apply to a plain dumb sRGB profile as commonly assumed by most devices. It even matters for how the colors are transformed in the textures for the viewport shading. Point in case: If you do such stuff without proper CM, it's pretty much only valid on your own system. Don't get me wrong: It's better than nothing and most people won't care, but personally I'd be extremely wary to use this without knowing a few of these parameters.

Mylenium

That makes no sense. The monitor is purely an output device. It only effects how colors appear to the viewer, not how they're valued and saved by the computer itself. If I take a screenshot when the monitor is turned off, don't get a blank image. You might as well say that having a bad printhead that smudges typed documents changes how the computer parses unicode.

Edited August 25, 2021 by BrokenEye

[supertruper1988]

23 hours ago, Mylenium said:

Not the point. If your monitor uses a specific color profile, the skewed colors are already baked into a screenshot, hence any such representation would look incorrect on other computers. That would even apply to a plain dumb sRGB profile as commonly assumed by most devices. It even matters for how the colors are transformed in the textures for the viewport shading. Point in case: If you do such stuff without proper CM, it's pretty much only valid on your own system. Don't get me wrong: It's better than nothing and most people won't care, but personally I'd be extremely wary to use this without knowing a few of these parameters.

Mylenium

Based on the text of the above posts, from @BrokenEye I believe him to be be saying that he gathered the color codes directly from the program which are not affected by any such color adjustments on the monitor output side.

[BrokenEye]

12 hours ago, supertruper1988 said:

Based on the text of the above posts, from @BrokenEye I believe him to be be saying that he gathered the color codes directly from the program which are not affected by any such color adjustments on the monitor output side.

I also got a bunch of colors from Bricklink. They've got more of them than LDD does.

[ncx]

I realize this post is very old but I just want to post to thank you for taking the time to make all these swatches into a neatly organized zip and you even labeled each color swatch. Props!  This will help tremendously when designing my mocs and prints.

[Jason C. Hand]

Thanks again!

[dutchlegofan50]

Thanks for this. I noticed that you have used RGB which is fine for monitor use. For printing purposes a CMYK version would be even more useful. Ryan Howerter has published the most extensive colour table I know of (link). For all LEGO colours there are RGB values as well as CMYK.

A while ago I was busy making colour swatches based on these CMYK values. I use these in Adobe InDesign to make stickers and when making instructions. But I haven't attempted to create the full range of colours in this yet. If there is enough interest I'll give it a try. I will then do that in the format .ase, which stands for Adobe Swatch Exchange. That way you can load a colour palette into PhotoShop or InDesign without having to mess with your program files folder.

My background is in the printing industry, I know a bit (30 years of experience) about reproducing colours :-)

[BrokenEye]

6 hours ago, dutchlegofan50 said:

Thanks for this. I noticed that you have used RGB which is fine for monitor use. For printing purposes a CMYK version would be even more useful. Ryan Howerter has published the most extensive colour table I know of (link). For all LEGO colours there are RGB values as well as CMYK.

A while ago I was busy making colour swatches based on these CMYK values. I use these in Adobe InDesign to make stickers and when making instructions. But I haven't attempted to create the full range of colours in this yet. If there is enough interest I'll give it a try. I will then do that in the format .ase, which stands for Adobe Swatch Exchange. That way you can load a colour palette into PhotoShop or InDesign without having to mess with your program files folder.

My background is in the printing industry, I know a bit (30 years of experience) about reproducing colours :-)

Good thinking