Advanced Color Heuristics

[Don Allen]

I do mainly live music and musicals and have used LightFactory for many years as it has a feature called Advanced Color Heuristics, spelt with no u in color. The explanation from the user manual is:

"LightFactory has a unique feature that allows the software to calculate color matching for fixtures that have more than the 3 primary colors (RGB, CMY or HSI). The advanced color heuristics system of LightFactory attempts to overcome this problem by applying an advanced algorithm to calculate how much of the other colors should be applied. It should be noted that this algorithm is not perfect and is an approximation of the maximum output for a selected color. Because you may need to work with this option frequently you will find the same check box in the attribute color picker. You can change this setting in either location."

 

One of the main reasons why I use this feature is because when selected, LightFactory will use all led emitters to approximate the colour you select in the colour picker, for example Rosco R000 Clear uses R100%, G100%, B100%, W91%, A48%, U/V70%, which significantly increases the output intensity. Selecting White on the spectrum uses R100%, G88%, B86%, W100%, A50%, U/V76%.

 

Apart from the Nero which uses LightFactory as its operating system, which lighting desks use Advanced Color Heuristic ?

[niclights]

Avolites Titan has this capability. It is not called 'Advanced Color Heuristic'.

[Tomo]

"Advanced Lighting Heuristic" is a very strange term.

That makes it sound like they don't know that there's actual science involved (mostly biology).

 

ETC Eos, Cobalt, ColorSource, and even Smartfade ML consoles have had internal "absolute" colour for calibrated colour mixing for fixtures with arbitrary emitters for many years.

 

It's the ETC Desire and Source Four LED fixtures that pretty much created the need for it.

 

The ETC system uses actual Science^TM of human vision and measurements of real fixtures, and is quite accurate for fixtures that have been measured.

 

I wonder what algorithm LightFactory is using though, because that result makes very little sense to me.

Adding 70% UV for any "White" is just plain wrong, so it'd be very interesting to find out how they got that!

 

It sounds like they just position emitters around an arbitrary Hue circle, which is a very poor approximation.

 

It would be nice if they follow ANSI E1.54 - 2015, though I somehow doubt they have.

Edited July 28, 2019 by Tomo

[david.elsbury]

Also it’s the Strand “Neo” not ‘nero’ ;)