Topic Title

Does anyone know how to create .rgb Dcad colour palettes from a paint manufacturer's colours? Thanks.

Hello Ken,

There are several color patterns in DataCAD installation. They are stored at "\Support Files" folder and are all named *.RGB.
All color patterns in DataCAD follow the RGB color table (from Red, Green and Blue), and they are limited to 255 color/tones, plus Color 'Zero'. Generaly the professional printing palettes are expressed on a different system: CMYK (from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black), which allows more accurate tones control.
Any image processing software can handle both formats. I use Paint Shop Pro, but there is Adobe Photo Shop and many alike in the market.

As long as you know the correspondence for each color in the list, you can create your own color palette, like this below, the DEFAULT.RGB, opened on Notepad.



Data are organized in a table with four collumns (tab separated), in the order: Red for the first, Green the second, Blue the third and the name on the fourth position.
You can get all data from an Excel sheet exporte text-format "tab separated" and fill the file.

Please pay attention that the color 'zero' (black) is kept as the counterpart for white color, when the user chooses a white background, and you should keep the first 16 lines (15 standard colors and 'zero') for compatibility reasons to drawings created outside your installation.
Finally you're allowed actually to add 240 colors to your new palette.

To have this new palette loaded on every new drawing, is enough to load it to your default drawing file.

Hope this helps,
Miguel

Hello Ken,

I have a couple of these in the Cheap Trick catalog: Benjamin Moore "Historical" colors, and the the current Sherwin Williams catalog; which takes 12 separate RGB files, since you are limited to 257 total colors (256 plus the Color 0), minus the 16 standard DataCAD colors (at the beginning of the file), leaving you 241 custom colors per file.

They are not hard to make -- if you get the RGB values from the manufacturer, you can format them in a spread sheet or word processor to conform to the DataCAD RGB file (as Miguel shows above), you just save the text file as an RGB file, and load it into DataCAD.

Thanks Miguel and Neil, BUT,

I open the default.rgb in Notepad - copy the first 16 lines - open a new Notepad - paste the first 16 lines - add my custom paint values as you describe - save as a new .rgb - open Dcad - load new.rgb and I get the new.rgb but with all the Dcad default.rgb colours and not my custom paint colours.
Where am I going wrong? I tend to use a set of a few basic colours in my jobs and it would be convenient to have a matching pallete for o2c. Thanks.

Hello Ken,

Double check that you are not saving it as FileName.RGB.TXT? If that isn't it, post the contents here, and let us take a look...

Figured it out!
After you enter your own custom colours you have to fill the remainder of the 240 lines with white to occupy the unused pallete boxes.
Thanks for your help.

unused is perhaps the wrong description - better to say unwanted.