Colors don't quite match on Icon Editor versus actual Icon

[Mike Le]

So this is a new one for me, hopefully someone else has seen this problem?

 

I'm editing the VI Icon Template for one of my classes. It's simple with a colored header and text. I set the header to dark green in the editor and everything looks great.

 

When I close out of the editor, the actual icon color becomes brownish green. If I apply the template to all my methods, then my method icons also show brownish green. I verified it's actually a different color using the Dropper tool. But when I go back to look at it in the class's Icon Template editor, it's still dark green.

 

Anyone seen anything like this? Screenshot below.

 

[Darin]

The icon editor is happily letting you pick and choose from the full gamut of 24-bit colors.  The actual icon display is only 8-bit color, though.  Not a problem, you say, who is going to have more than 256 different colors on a 32x32 icon?  Unfortunately, those 256 colors are fixed by LV so you are seeing what LV deemed is the closest color amongst the 256 it has predetermined to display.

 

Many editors have a button you can push to coerce the arbitrary color to the restricted set (say Web-safe colors for example).  I don't want this in LV, though, I want 32-bit color (ok I'd settle for 24).  It would be nice, however to have an inkling of what is about to happen, since I have found many times the "closest" color chosen is probably not what I would choose.

[hooovahh]

I was making some subVI that used a private method, and I wanted to know by looking at the subVI that it was private and shouldn't be used in end applications.  I thought the easiest way was to color the icon to have a background the same brownish color that private methods have.  I had difficulty finding the color that was the closes because of this reason and ended up trying a bunch of things to get it right.  It just seemed odd to me that LabVIEW's property nodes had a color that my subVI could not come very close to.

 

All of this apparently is due to the limitation Darin mentioned.

Edited May 24, 2013 by hooovahh

[Mike Le]

Thanks for the info. What puzzles me is that the color I chose was what I thought of as a default system color, "LED Off" green. I haven't messed with the default colors in my LabVIEW environment so I figured that color (RGB: 30/75/0) would be fine with the icon editor.

 

Anyway, I ended up tweaking to a slightly different green and everything's fine now. Just a bizarre problem I'd never run into before.

[Darin]

Oh yes, LED off, that is a very tempting choice.

 

Some people are crazy enough to turn subVIs into XNodes for no other reason than to draw icons with 24-bit color.

[JackDunaway]

The BD is rendered with the Web Safe color palette. Mapping from your 24-bit icon editor to this Web Safe palette appears to be based on RGB least squares rather than an HSV match; for this reason, it's probably best to attempt to design your icons starting with the Web Safe palette, because the matching for dark shades often misses the mark for Hue (as shown in your first post).

 

This also means converting bitmaps to the Web Safe palette prior to importing into the Icon Editor, since the color matching routine of your image editor is likely to produce better results.

 

You're in for a treat if you're into pastels, with this palette.

 

(image search for the Web Safe palette: https://www.google.com/search?q=web+safe+palette&tbm=isch)