Compliment Your Partner With Hex Code

Freelance Switch recently ran a colorful competition. In it, they asked visitors to reveal their favorite color and explain why it was this particular hue. The winning entry offered by Andy Martin vermillion, because it sounds like a small creature and something irresistibly delicious at the same time. But, much more subtle was freelancer Rhys’ entry in which he suggested the color: R:246 G:242 B:235 Apparently, this is the color of his wife’s face when the sun is rising on an early Sunday morning, when he and she go camping. Soooo romantic and such a clever way to compliment his wife. One of the reader comments, summed it up thus: “Being able to pass off a hex color code as a compliment to your wife is astounding. If you can tie that in with a CSS style you’ve got a brilliant future ahead of you with Hallmark Greeting Cards”.

Indeed. But, I was a little curious as to what skin tone that hex code actually described and so hit Photoshop to check it out. It was not a bright scarlet or even vermilion, but a very, very pale apricot. More an off-white than a pinky flush in fact.

I was a bit confused. Maybe he had simply picked three random RGB values and pretended that was the color of his wife’s face where in fact he might have chosen R:247 G:197 B:181 instead, or if they had eaten some rather nasty undercooked refried beans on their camping trip R:96 G:216 B:96. I still don’t know. But, the competition did make me think that maybe my monitor gamma was not set correctly so that all the colors I was seeing were slightly off from how others with correctly configured monitors were seeing them.

So, I checked out this site, which discusses the issue of monitor gamma in detail, explains how to get it set properly, and offers some test screens to help you do the calibration.

Unfortunately, Rhys’ wife still looks a bit pale to my eye, but at least she has not turned that nasty shade of refried green.

One of the biggest advantages of getting your computer monitor gamma correction calibrated correctly(!) is that it means almost WYSIWYG when it comes to printing your digital photos. Unless you have a very limited gamut color printer, then the tones you see on a properly calibrated monitor will very much match those you will get when you print the photo.