Any decent color palette generators out there?

[BertMcMahan]

I have often found the built-in color schemes for LabVIEW plots to be... not great. Often the colors used are a little hard to see together, so I wind up fiddling with it to get a little better.

I use the ColorBrewer website when I really need to differentiate some colors, and it works great, but it'd be nice if something like this was automated. Plus, the site doesn't always give as many colors as I'd like for certain plots with lots of data.

Are there any decent color scheme generators out there? The ColorBrewer one is open source so I could definitely code one up, but this seems like something that someone else would've done 15 years ago and I'd rather not reinvent the wheel 🙂

[thols]

So you want to create LabVIEW code (or use an API) that creates a color scheme? What is your use-case?

I have tried to find a couple of standard schemes and based that on colorBrewer and looked at some others too, and peeked at Excel. Is it not enough to have some presets to select from?

Have you looked at Adobes scheme creator? I like the "Extract them" and "Extract gradient" that has, and the accessibility tools.

[BertMcMahan]

I hadn't seen Adobe's scheme, that's interesting.

My use case is for plotting. I do loads of plotting with different numbers of plots; sometimes just a couple, sometimes with 8 or 10 lines (showing trends).

I'd like something that will auto-pick some colors. For example, maybe I have a plot of performance data of a DUT at 0 degrees, 10, 20, 30, up to 100. I'd like to have 10 colors picked that gradually range from dark blue through light blue to light red to dark red, indicating temperature (that's a Diverging series from ColorBrewer).

Other times, I have 5 or 6 things on one plot, but they're all unique- for example, maybe I have a drive frequency, a position target, position error, and motor current. In that case I'd prefer to have four distinct colors (Qualitative series). For example, maybe I want red, blue, green, and orange. If later I have 10 things on a plot, maybe I'd need a slightly different series.

Generally, the standard color set from Excel is decent, but the standard colors for LabVIEW aren't super great. And the first 3 colors in a 12-color series aren't the same 3 colors as I'd like to see in a 3-color series. I'm no expert, but basically I think you want to find n colors equidistant from each other in the RGB space.

I can program all of this manually, of course, especially with the ColorBrewer giving color palettes, but this seems like something other people would've needed in the past, hence my question.

If I don't hear from someone soonish I'll just make the thing myself the next time I need it. Hope that makes sense.

[RTSLVU]

I have to agree with you on this one and have suggested a LabVIEW "skinning engine" that would allow us to easily make changes to a panel color scheme and let the more artistic programmers distribute color schemes.

But it was rejected.

Personally I am NOT AN ARTIST and tend to use default colors and control sets so my programs look F'n UGLY or like something out of the 90's (The Modern and Silver sets)

This is the part about LabVIEW that bothers me the most. I could never use LabVIEW to make a program that was intended to be distributed to our customers.

[BertMcMahan]

A skinning engine would be great. I'm no artist either, but I've noticed that if I stick with the System palette (and the Missing System Controls suite) that my stuff looks 100x better than if I go with the Modern or Silver palettes. Some of the NXG stuff looks decent so I may give that a shot at some point.

[JensG69]

The toolkit from MGI contains a VI that creates nice plot colors - but for a white background.

Regards, Jens