TINA Color Samples (2 Viewers)

BigGrizz

Flush
Joined
Mar 20, 2025
Messages
1,056
Reaction score
1,249
Rewards
342
Location
California
I was wondering if anyone was interested in Tina color samples? I have some chips I've made from colors I'm hoping will push to the limits of what Tina can do so we can really see what their printers are capable of. I was thinking these could go on a no-mold ceramic and people could get a set to see the colors in person.

https://chipmaticstudio.com/share/qL1wvvbJqEoiH2cZ1G4aD

Each color would either be labeled with name and hex code, or we would just have a guide available for people to reference. This gives 80 colors for people to work with (1 barrel of chips). What do people think?

The Colors
Carmine Red – Scarlet - Crimson – Strawberry
Cherry – Mandarin – Blood Red - Watermelon
Neon Orange – Pumpkin – Burnt Orange – Coral
Arc Yellow – Gold – Butterscotch - Redwood
Canary – Paulson Canary – Goldenrod – Citrine
Daisy – Saturn – Maize - Pastel Yellow
Malachite – Jade – Avocado – Olive Drab
Turquoise – Light Sea Green – Sky Blue – Dark Turquoise
Pastel Green – Sherbert Green – Moss Green – Mint Green
Aqua – Dolphin Blue – Sky Blue – Day Blue
Bahama Blue – Horizon Blue – Royal Blue – Midnight Blue
Royal Purple – Plum – Lavender – Orchid
Hot Pink – Rose – Razmatazz – Light Violet
Fuchsia – Salmon – Flamingo – Pastel Pink
Saddleback – Chocolate – Russet – Maroon
Tan – Bronze – Apricot – Peach
Pure White – Vanilla – Almond - Ivory
Grey – Showboat Grey – Silver – Platinum
True Black – Gunmetal – Charcoal – Coffee
Burgundy – Tiger – Pear – Blurple
 
I did the math and it would be only $7.40 per sample set with a minimum $185 to get started. I'd be willing to put in a good chunk myself. I figure if @justincarothers is interested then he could keep some in stock for people to order with sample sets. He could even charge like $10 or $15 to turn a profit.
 
Well what I was thinking is for them to work with chipmatic and print a color name and a hexcode on the chip. That way you can just pop the code into chipmatic for that exact color. Like our Tina version of the pantone system. It also would give a nice base 80 colors to work from.
 
Well what I was thinking is for them to work with chipmatic and print a color name and a hexcode on the chip. That way you can just pop the code into chipmatic for that exact color. Like our Tina version of the pantone system.
But you would need a printed sample of that specific color in-hand for it to be effective. Unless I’m understanding this wrong.
 
That's exactly this. This would be an in hand example of what these look like with their reference hexcodes. It would take the guesswork out of what a chip will actually look like.
 
Also to note, a lot of these colors are the paulson translation colors, a couple are CPC translations, and the rest are figma printing colors I picked out to give a really wide range.
 
That's exactly this. This would be an in hand example of what these look like with their reference hexcodes. It would take the guesswork out of what a chip will actually look like.
@Cratty had these made up with chips and labels, for the matching of the Tangiers faux-shaped-inlay hybrids. I’m not sure if they were hex coded, maybe CMYK.
I’m fairly certain Tina uses CMYK for printing, possibly 6-color (CMYK+lc+lm) printing.
IMG_8017.webp
 
@Cratty had these made up with chips and labels, for the matching of the Tangiers faux-shaped-inlay hybrids. I’m not sure if they were hex coded, maybe CMYK.
I’m fairly certain Tina uses CMYK for printing, possibly 6-color (CMYK+lc+lm) printing.
View attachment 1676422
I think Cratty also mentioned those were made on the old printer? (could be wrong here)

But I'm also very impressed at how well they lined up those labels! :wow:
 
I was using hex codes because that's how Chipmatic enters the colors. Those would work if they could be indexed though. I was trying to create a system with an index for easy reference. Basically hold chip, "I like this," click and add color in Chipmatic. Also I thought quarters would give a better color representation and that 80 colors was probably enough.

I also figured it wouldn't be hard to get new sets every 2 years or so to track changes to Tina's settings.
 
I was using hex codes because that's how Chipmatic enters the colors. Those would work if they could be indexed though. I was trying to create a system with an index for easy reference. Basically hold chip, "I like this," click and add color in Chipmatic. Also I thought quarters would give a better color representation and that 80 colors was probably enough.

I also figured it wouldn't be hard to get new sets every 2 years or so to track changes to Tina's settings.
The issue is that the chipmatic tool is for on-screen designing, where RGB and HEX are appropriate. Those colors need to be converted to CMYK during the chip making process, and there’s lots of colors that are just not possible in CMYK. The most notable are bright blues…they look beautiful on-screen, but convert them to CMYK and they get muddier and duller. It’s just the nature of computer screen to CMYK printing, and has been an issue as long as there have been designers creating on the computer.

Adding to this issue, some colors offered by Paulson and CPC will never be able to be replicated with CMYK printing. Mixing those 4 colors (or maybe 6 colors) is so much more restrictive because Paulson and CPC use dyes for their colors, not a mixture of colors like CMYK and Pantone. An extreme example is the neon or dayglo colors of Paulson and CPC…you won’t get near that brightness on a printed chip.
 
I was using hex codes because that's how Chipmatic enters the colors. Those would work if they could be indexed though. I was trying to create a system with an index for easy reference. Basically hold chip, "I like this," click and add color in Chipmatic. Also I thought quarters would give a better color representation and that 80 colors was probably enough.

I also figured it wouldn't be hard to get new sets every 2 years or so to track changes to Tina's settings.
Maybe if you worked with Maple you can use his existing full rainbow grid and take every second colour and put them onto pentagon chips, then people can "guestimate" what the colour in between might look like. Then if Maple labels each colour in each row you could line that up with whatever you see on the computer to what you see on the actual chip.

1778192308988.webp


Only issue is he has 19 rows of colour, so you'd have to sacrifice 3 rows. (I would personally get rid of the similar blue and orange rows and then not include the "greys" at the bottom.
 
My understanding from Cratty is that his old color wheel chips were produced on a different printer than what Tina uses now, so they aren't of much use now. I agree with BigGrizz that they would be useful as a visual reference. I might go up to 6 or 8 segments per chip though for even more color references.

With a color sample set, I might even be able to generate an ICC profile that could be used to improve soft proofing on Chipmatic. If we have 80+ different data points that say something like "The printed result of #C8C814 is lab(78.25, -17.71, 76.47)", then we can use those data points to create a full color profile. The model would interpolate between the reference points for hex values that we don't have samples for. There is probably some strategy in picking the RGB/hex colors that we use in the samples to generate the most useful profile, but I need to do a little research to figure that out...
 
Yeah, I threw all of my samples away. Tina changed printers in between making my sample set and the Tangiers order.. was lovely of her to not advise a change beforehand. Colors between printers were significantly different in some cases, hence trashed.

That said, my view was most colors were close enough to a color printed copy that I didn’t see the need for a color sample set, unless someone tried to color match inlays. And to that point… no one should try to color match labels IMO, way more variation in inlay printing than I expected and just a money pit.
 
My understanding from Cratty is that his old color wheel chips were produced on a different printer than what Tina uses now, so they aren't of much use now. I agree with BigGrizz that they would be useful as a visual reference. I might go up to 6 or 8 segments per chip though for even more color references.

With a color sample set, I might even be able to generate an ICC profile that could be used to improve soft proofing on Chipmatic. If we have 80+ different data points that say something like "The printed result of #C8C814 is lab(78.25, -17.71, 76.47)", then we can use those data points to create a full color profile. The model would interpolate between the reference points for hex values that we don't have samples for. There is probably some strategy in picking the RGB/hex colors that we use in the samples to generate the most useful profile, but I need to do a little research to figure that out...
My only strategy in picking colors was to pick what people are mostly using as well as a few to push tina's capabilities.
 
Does she care about 4 or 5 pie chips? Because the thought was to order them like normal in packs of 25, then let people have one of each as a sample.
 
The issue is that the chipmatic tool is for on-screen designing, where RGB and HEX are appropriate. Those colors need to be converted to CMYK during the chip making process, and there’s lots of colors that are just not possible in CMYK. The most notable are bright blues…they look beautiful on-screen, but convert them to CMYK and they get muddier and duller. It’s just the nature of computer screen to CMYK printing, and has been an issue as long as there have been designers creating on the computer.

Adding to this issue, some colors offered by Paulson and CPC will never be able to be replicated with CMYK printing. Mixing those 4 colors (or maybe 6 colors) is so much more restrictive because Paulson and CPC use dyes for their colors, not a mixture of colors like CMYK and Pantone. An extreme example is the neon or dayglo colors of Paulson and CPC…you won’t get near that brightness on a printed chip.
This is the reason for the idea. Basically this would be a tableau of colors where the guesswork is gone. You enter the hexcode in chipmatic, you don't get what is on screen. But if you have a set of these, you at least know what you will get. It won't be exact to the screen or paulson, etc., but it will be exact to what is in your hand.

Basically for $10 you get a barrel of chips that give you a range of colors where you know exactly what you are getting.
 
This is the reason for the idea. Basically this would be a tableau of colors where the guesswork is gone. You enter the hexcode in chipmatic, you don't get what is on screen. But if you have a set of these, you at least know what you will get. It won't be exact to the screen or paulson, etc., but it will be exact to what is in your hand.

Basically for $10 you get a barrel of chips that give you a range of colors where you know exactly what you are getting.
Yeah, you will know what you will get until Tina changes printer or settings, but just a risk folks should be aware of. Don’t expect communication from them either in advance of any changes.
 
Understood. That's why I thought getting new ones annually might be good.
 
Last edited:
The issue is that the chipmatic tool is for on-screen designing, where RGB and HEX are appropriate. Those colors need to be converted to CMYK during the chip making process, and there’s lots of colors that are just not possible in CMYK. The most notable are bright blues…they look beautiful on-screen, but convert them to CMYK and they get muddier and duller. It’s just the nature of computer screen to CMYK printing, and has been an issue as long as there have been designers creating on the computer.

Adding to this issue, some colors offered by Paulson and CPC will never be able to be replicated with CMYK printing. Mixing those 4 colors (or maybe 6 colors) is so much more restrictive because Paulson and CPC use dyes for their colors, not a mixture of colors like CMYK and Pantone. An extreme example is the neon or dayglo colors of Paulson and CPC…you won’t get near that brightness on a printed chip.

So I made an updated list. 22 chips of quarter colors (so that Tina isn't doing color wheels). This would still keep color samples at under $9+shipping. Initial investment would be $205 rounded for 25 sets.

This is the working color info. Should be just about whatever color someone should need.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/170KX3rzvfBb71yp_RMKOr3oZmz1eekzI532pNhP9PEk/edit?gid=0#gid=0

https://chipmaticstudio.com/share/0mdbx_qByNL58Tx58dqKM

I'd be in for a color sample set too. Nice idea @BigGrizz .

Question, maybe for the designers and experts: Since printers and presummably Tina use CMYK colors to print, wouldn't it be good to have @BigGrizz 's lookup table show CMYK values instead of (or in addition to) the RGB codes? Then chippers can select their colors with the sample set and design with CMYK values and @QuietMaple 's cool tool would design and do the soft proofing to view them on-screen? Or Chipmatic could export the design with CMYK colors for soft proofing in other already available tools.
 
So, the vector art files that Chipmatic produces are in the SVG file format. Unfortunately, SVG only supports RGB color. I would like to use the Adobe Illustrator Artwork (.ai) file format (which does support CMYK), but it's a proprietary format without public documentation, which makes outputting in that format impractical.


The other complication is that there is no "standard" translation from RGB to CMYK. Different printers will use different color profiles to convert from RGB to CMYK, which take in to account the actual behaviors of their printing hardware, ink properties, paper whiteness, gamut mapping, etc.


Therefore, if we added a CMYK column the BigGrizz's sheet, it won't necessarily be the CMYK value that Tina uses during the printing process, so I think it would actually lead to more confusion.
 
So really the only thing to figure out is distribution. Idk if @justincarothers wants any kind of participation. I don't have much experience in shipping stuff personally. If we get 25 sets for interested people then we are in business.
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account and join our community. It's easy!

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Back
Top Bottom