I thought I had my head around this, and resetting the picker profile would work but — no — as you found, the whole thing is just broken. I realise now the picker is a disaster tool in RW, and understand why I’ve been getting colour problems from it for years. As Gary says, the only way is to code around it. I’m now going to add an interface choice for my stacks where the user can input a hex value directly into the css, rather than using the picker to do this. And, basically, the only way of getting colour consistency on the page is to override stacks‘ picker settings with css.
Just to be clear: there’s color picker and there’s the eye dropper (pipette) tool inside the color picker window.
The pipette captures colours as the screen is, not what the code is. This I recommend not to use.
The color picker works, if you follow the steps I described above, at least: for me it’s working and consistent.
Edit: There’s no way of redefining a color in the tray. Simply delete is (drag to bin or del/cmd-del) and then follow the steps.
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I have a longstanding problem with the picker not sticking with the colour I type, though. Frequently (but erratically) I’ve found that the value I had entered is replaced with what was there before. Sometimes this can get very frustrating. It also seems to have the same problem with retaining its profile settings, I notice now. If I reset them and subsequently select a colour swatch that is sRGB, the picker will revert back to sRGB and stay there.
Going forward the only fix, as Gary suggests, is to replace the picker as Adobe and Affinity applications do. Perhaps this could be done as a RW addon (I don‘t know what the RW API allows)? I don’t have the greatest confidence it will be addressed in Stacks Pro, but I’m happy to be proved wrong about this.
This is probably redundant, but you do “lock” the color setting (the border goes from light to back to dark) after you enter the value in color picker and then select it, right? As a step in between you might check that the profile in the color picker is still ‘generic rgb’ after you enter it.
I totally agree with you and Gary, hopefully @isaiah replaces the macOS color picker with a Stacks Pro native one.
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I’m sorry Erwin, but web designers not looking for ‘Generic RGB’, there is no such thing and everything will go badly wrong if you attempt to work with it. sRGB is a fact, a defined colour space that has been ubiquitous for consumer devices for the last 20 years.
For web design, everything should be setup as sRGB. However, your problems are arising because an Apple display has its own colour profile, so a screen grab for example has to be opened in Photoshop and ‘Converted’ to sRGB (not assigned as) before use in a proper colour managed environment.
To get accurate hex vales for a graphic, open it in Photoshop / Illustrator or similar. These applications will read the colour profile and as long as colour space is set to sRGB, the graphic will be displayed correctly and the picked hex values will be correct in RW. I spent years working with this stuff in the noughties and ended up setting up colour management for Reuters, Globally.
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Yes, what you describe works, but that was not getting the colors from other pages or pictures what I was after.
The tool for that is clearly not Apple’s color picker’s eye dropper tool: it sucks (pun intended).
What I was after is in those cases when I have/get a set of predetermined colors. Let’s say you were asked to build a page for a Ferrari garage (either one that sells full scale cars, children’s carts or 1:8 models). You would get the request (trust me it’s not a request) to use color #ff2800. RW/Stacks has proven very unreliable to do that. Gary’s method (defining the color in CSS) is what works and, after some serious experimenting, setting the profile (in the color picker tool, so not the eye dropper and not the Mac’s color profile) to ‘Generic RGB’ works too.
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I’m not having that problem with colour pickers, so long as the sample size is big enough. However if a brand colour is critical, I always read the colour from an edit capable app as it is always going to be accurate.
This issue here is not that a picker missreads or corrupts or includes a colour profile colour cast.
The word “picker” is used just to point that use of the Mac Picker triggers an event in RW or RW+Stacks or who knows where.
If this event occurs, then if you enter a colour into a Stacks colour well, that the colour may be corrupted.
E.g. If the event is triggered, then if you enter a colour something like #BB343C, and publish or preview that page and then use Inspector, you will see a different colout in the actual code created by RW.
To recap, you type #BB343C into the Stacks colour well and see it in there, but when you publish or preview, you see a different hex code for the colour such as something like #BB6CEE. This is nothing to do with the picker at this point.
Whatever colour you type into a web creation App, it should use that exact colour on the generated page.
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