Hey @marmak3261–
I wonder if you could recheck your hex code for color number 9 (lime green). I was checking through my Illustrator Glowforge palette to verify the hex codes, and for that one I’m getting #64ff00 if you use the RGB values of 100 255 0. Your value of #c8ff00 seems to correspond to RGB values of 200 255 0.
Thanks!
Hey @rusty.tracey
Thanks for doing all that work! I’d like to try your palette but it does not open properly on my older version of Illustrator (CS5). So I was going to try to get it out of the SVG you posted but that doesn’t download at all (is there an error in the link?).
If I end up recreating the palette for CS5, I’ll go ahead and post it here if that’s okay.
You are correct. I fixed above. Thanks.
Yeah you’re more than welcome to share a CS5 compatible version. When I saved/exported it I didn’t see a backwards compatibility option.
I’ve attached the SVG I used to get it all sorted out.
I’ve also attached the Illustrator (CS6) file in case the SVG doesn’t work again.
EDIT Added CS5 version.
Glowforge_Full_26_Cut_Sequence_Test.ai (1.1 MB)
Glowforge_Full_26_Cut_Sequence_Test_CS5.ai (1.1 MB)
Thank you so much! I was able to open your SVG this time. And it was so kind of you to do the CS5 version. I installed it and it is working great!
Since I received my Glowforge a few months ago, I’ve been happily making use of the color palette in this thread’s first message (thanks @marmak3261!). I’ve always felt some of the colors are a little too similar, though, so I set out to find a better one. After some searching, I came across Sasha Trubetskoy’s List of 20 Simple, Distinct Colors that was designed to be “easily distinguishable” and “tastefully luminant.” Re-sorted into “Glowforge order,” the palette is:
Black #000000
Navy #000080
Teal #008080
Blue #0082C8
Green #3CB44B
Cyan #46F0F0
Maroon #800000
Olive #808000
Grey #808080
Purple #911EB4
Brown #AA6E28
Mint #AAFFC3
Lime #D2F53C
Red #E6194B
Lavender #E6BEFF
Magenta #F032E6
Orange #F58231
Pink #FABEBE
Coral #FFD8B1
Yellow #FFE119
Beige #FFFAC8
White #FFFFFF
(It’s actually 22 colors if you include black and white.) I suspect I could have arrived at a similar palette by winnowing down @marmak3261’s palette to eliminate some of the confusing pairs, but so be it.
That process got me thinking about colorblindness. I’d heard that to create a palette that’s distinguishable by more than about 85% of the population, you’re limited to under ten colors or so. I found an excellent article by Martin Krzywinski (Color Palettes for Color Blindness) that led me to a seven-color palette (eight if you include white) developed by Bang Wong. In a glowforge sort order, it’s:
Black #000000
Blue #0072B2
Bluish green #009E73
Sky blue #56B4E9
Reddish purple #CC79A7
Vermillion #D55E00
Orange #E69F00
Yellow #F0E442
White #FFFFFF
I’m not colorblind, but I rarely need more than about 4-5 operations in my projects, so I’ve switched to using the Wong palette almost exclusively.
Here they are in graphical form:
And as Affinity Designer palettes:
Glowforge - trubetskoy.afpalette.zip (1.2 KB)
Glowforge - wong.afpalette.zip (989 Bytes)
Thanks! Very useful.
Is there an easy way to get this into Illustrator CS6 on Windows 10?
Sorry, @Scott.Burns, I’m not an Illustrator user these days. I know you can easily add all the colors from a document to a palette (or “swatch library”), but I have no idea what the exact command is called. Here are the two palettes as separate SVGs.
You should be able to load one, create a new swatch library, then use the “Add swatches from document” command (or whatever it’s called) to populate it. I suspect the swatches will end up in the wrong order, though, so you’ll have to re-order by hand.
Maybe an Illustrator guru can chime in?
Thank you immensely @bdm1. While I wait for my shipping notification, I thought I start setting up Illustrator. This is hugely helpful.
Really appreciate you doing this @bdm1!
I played around and created an Illustrator swatch library from your Trubetskoy palette:
Glowforge_trubetskoy.ai (218.5 KB)
Here’s what it looks like in an SVG:
I imported it into the GFUI and confirmed that it does load in the order listed.
The palette library works great in my Illustrator CS5 (Mac) but I imagine it can be easily imported into the swatch library of most any version.
Thanks for converting to Illustrator! Works great in CS6 (Win10).
Oh, good, I had bookmarked that palette to pull into Illustrator – thanks for doing the heavy lifting!
Huge thanks. I had gone through and setup a template using the other 26 color version and noticed that there were some similar tones, but thought I would just deal with it. Now, I don’t have to. Thanks again!
I get this message when I clock on the Glowforge.ai link -The PostScript file “Glowforge.ai.ps” could not be converted to a PDF file.
Does anyone know how to remedy this?
Remove “.ps” then open in Illustrator.
First, thanks for the info and the illustrator swatches - these are super helpful.
For anyone having trouble installing the swatches on newer Mac versions of Illustrator:
Even easier (although not persistent) you can just load the swatch as an external file from Illustrator. Window > Swatch Libraries > Other Library… - then point at the .ai file.
Since colors map out to a number, it appears that the layer ordering just goes along with the hex or binary representation of the color. So if you start with black = 0 = #000000 and go all the way to white = 16777215 = #FFFFFF then you can switch your layers just by increasing or decreasing the number.
000000
00000F
0000F0
000F00
00F000
0F0000
F00000
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE this pallet, but wanted to explain that people can change things or add more layers and still keep things in order. However, I’m a bit confused why there are 2 extra “ff” characters at the ends of these numbers though. For instance, Lime Green is #64ff00 and not #64ff00ff (see http://www.htmlcsscolor.com/hex/64FF00) Is that an inkscape thing?
How to adjust the pallet colors a bit
Let’s say that the lime green color is hard on your eyes and you want to use something closer to a green apple color… http://www.htmlcsscolor.com/hex/6AA84F, you can just swap that one out and it will be in the same place… as long as you dont make the number higher than red or lower than the purple layer. Break the hex number up into 3 pairs… the first pair for purple is 64 and the first pair for red is FF… so anything between those will go on a layer between those. In this case, the green apple starts with 6A, so we’re golden.
I’ve updated the layers below to reflect that. I also took off the extra FF characters
==by the way, the use of 100 (64 hex) instead of 128 (80 hex) is a great touch… darker but uniformly so.
|0 0 0|1 black (#000000)|
|0 0 255|2 dark blue (#0000ff)|
|0 100 0|3 dark green (#006400)|
| 0 100 255|4 navy blue (#0064ff)|
| 0 255 0|5 bright green (#00ff00)|
| 0 255 255|6 aqua blue (#00ffff)|
|100 0 0|7 brown (#640000)|
|100 0 255|8 purple (#6400ff)|
|106 168 79|9 apple green (#6AA84F)|
|255 0 0|10 red (#ff0000)|
|255 0 255|11 magenta (#ff00ff)|
|255 100 0|12 orange (#ff6400ff)|
|255 255 0|13 yellow (ffff00)|
Or am I crazy/wrong and should just delete this post? 
Every contribution is welcome. Whatever works for your eyes.
the fourth set of numbers is the alpha opacity channel. It’s used the the GIMP palette description so I kept it.
I’m a bit confused why there are 2 extra “ff” characters at the ends of these numbers though. For instance, Lime Green is #64ff00 and not #64ff00ff
There are a zillion ways to define colors (in a computer). The most common is “24 bit RGB” color which has 8 bits each for red, green, and blue. What you’re seeing is “32 bit RGBA” color, which adds an extra channel on the end - which is used for “alpha” or the transparency/opacity of the color. Your example means “Lime green, 100% opaque.”
Be careful with your file settings, Illustrator is often set up for publishing and can use CMYK color space (which is a totally different system designed to simulate inks on paper). Photoshop sometimes uses way more depth, going all the way up to 32-bits for each color channel. Finally there are competing ways to encode the alpha channel, which put it either before or after your color values, known as RGBA or ARGB.
Lucky for us that’s not a problem in the case of laser-step management, as hex colors still stack in the same order regardless of which color space they are being represented in.
