Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with color

What's a nice to way to demand, "Please fix my hair so I don't look like I work at Hot Topic."

Viola — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:54:01 -0800

I just spent way too much money at the salon for highlights, and after a few days I realized that I am not happy with the outcome. Is there any standard recourse or should I just fix this myself? I came into my favorite salon last week to get a color correction where I initially decided to go from dark brown to medium red. The colorist advised me against a damaging correction and suggested red highlights. I was REALLY specific about not wanting anything fake-looking. The initial process worked well for everything but a few highlights, which didn't absorb the red dye. He asked that I give my hair some time to relax and he'd put apply more color in a few days, at no extra charge.

I came back after a week and the colorist put more color all over my hair and left it on for 15 minutes. When we dried my hair, I noticed it was darker than I wanted, but I didn't want to make a fuss over what seemed like a minor concern that a couple shampoos would take care of. Now that I'm home, I realize that the bright salon lights played tricks on my eyes--my hair is a lot darker than I wanted; the red is exactly the color I told the colorist to avoid. I'm not pleased at all.

The problem is, I put on a big smile for the colorist and said I was really happy with the outcome. He's a great guy, sometimes I just swing by the salon to say hi to him and the rest of the employees because they're all so great, and he was so pleased when I said I liked the color. I can't stand the idea of trotting back to the salon and whining about my hair if I'm SOL anyways.

So, how typical is it for a customer to come back after a few days and complain about a cut/color that they initially greenlit? Did I just forgo my rights to get this taken care of affordably and in good will because I walked out of the salon when I should have had the cajones to say something? Is there a home remedy I can use that tones down burgundy overtones?

Answer this and help me stay fashionable.

phaded — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:24:31 -0800

For a 23 year-old male, what color could I buy a pair of sneakers in and expect them to go with most things? I need a new pair of sneakers, and I'm leaning heavily towards a pair of slip-on Vans/Converse. I'm not sure what color to get them in, though; I want something that, as I said, will go with almost anything I wear. (For the record, I tend to dress "hipster-ish," I guess; a typical outfit for me consists of a t-shirt and jeans.)

I was thinking that navy blue or grey would likely work, but I want to see what the consensus is.

Permanent hair color atop temporary hair color: please discuss.

iguanapolitico — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:32:16 -0800

Permanent hair color atop temporary hair color: please discuss. I used a temporary hair color on Tuesday night, and it's not the right color. I'd like to do something about it this weekend, maybe.

I should start by saying that until a few years ago, I colored my hair (myself, out of the box) for years and years. I'm not terribly afraid of new colors, or having weird color hair days, or any of that. And my hair is very short and very healthy, since it's been natural for a few years. And I really, really don't want to spend salon prices right now, and anyway, I've had better luck achieving the colors I've wanted at home.

So I'm thinking my alternatives, to tame this undesired hair color, are:

1) Wait the "28 washes" that the box says this color will last (and it's red, which is notorious for fading quickly, so it might go faster than that)

2) Use another temporary color over this color, to "fix" it (for the next 28 days)

3) Because I'm still interested in coloring my hair, go ahead and choose a permanent color (perhaps one that I've used before and am familiar with) and go that route

(I should also say that I'm not sure why I chose the temp color. It was a moment of madness, I think. I wanted to color my hair but didn't want to take the time to think about the color I wanted, so I quickly decided on the temporary stuff. There is no other reason why I chose the temp.)

But I've never used a permanent color on top of a temporary color. (I've never used temporary color at all.) What would happen? Would the permanent color maybe not "bind" to my hair as well? I do imagine the results of the permanent color will be influenced by the presence of the temporary color, but for how long? Will the temp color be able to continue washing out? Is this just a Bad Idea?

I'm mostly interested in replies from people who have actually done this. There are a lot of OMG GO TO A SALON FOR HAIR COLOR people out there, and I'm not one of them, so that knee-jerk response won't work on me. (I've ALWAYS done my own color, and my stylists have always gushed over it. They'd have tried to sell me a salon coloring job if they felt they could.)

I've done permanent-over-permanent, but have never used temporary before, so this is new territory for me. I'm not TOTALLY freaked out by the color, but ... I had really hoped it would fade more by now. I'm tired of the whole "Did you change your hair color?" "Yes, but it's not right and I'm changing it" conversation, and I've only been out of the house for 3 hours since Tuesday night. :)

Cinema Display Blues

MarshallPoe — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:10:07 -0800

DisplayColorFilter. Two Apple Cinema Displays on one Power Mac. One display has a blue color cast. What do I do? I'm running two Apple Cinema Displays on a MacPro. Both displays were purchased at approximately the same time (they are the same make, model, generation, etc.). One has a slight but noticeable bluish color cast that I'd really like to get rid of. All the settings in ColorSync are the same, as are the settings in monitor preferences. I've switched ports, checked connections, re-calibrated. I would try to manually fix the colors of the bluish display, but all the controls look forbidding. I don't know where to start. Can I get rid of the blues, or is my monitor broke?

Color Crazy

pranalaxmi — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:33:55 -0800

What color should I paint my porch if I want to keep a fire engine red door? I know there might be a myriad of options, but we're stumped. It's a small A-frame white house with clean white banisters along a cement front porch with steps that spill into the front yard...ie pretty standard. The door is red and we'd like to keep it that way. I've scraped the paint, sanded holes, and primed some spots. I've noticed that previous owners of the place painted it dark green, gray, and aquamarine before, but we want to move into the warm color schemes. My girlfriend picked out a terra cotta exterior porch enamel that ended up looking like Halloween when we started to put it down. Now we're rethinking it altogether. Suggestions?

Natural-looking (read: undetectable) highlights in New York?

pearl228 — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:39:33 -0800

So I am a female in my 20s, just moved to NYC, and need to find a top rate hair salon that does natural-looking highlights--which, as all we women know, requires word-of-mouth recommendations. Please, beauty junkie mefites, help! I have been going to O Salon in DC for years, having my terribly fine, medium brunette hair highlighted to a light brown/dirty blonde shade in tons of microscopic strips for about $250 a pop. The idea is that you can almost not see that it's colored, yadda yadda; there are no streaks. I also enjoy not having to touch them up for 12 weeks if I choose bc they are so subtle.

As any of you ladies who have your hair colored this way know, 98% of salons can't actually do this, despite the reviews they get on Yelp, Allure, etc.

Location, as long as it's within Manhattan, is not an issue. Price <$300 would be preferable.

Thank you much for your suggestions!

Help my site be more Muxtape-y

Blandanomics — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:36:00 -0800

How can I get the CSS "color" property to choose randomly between a prelisted set of colors? I'd like to find some sort of script will color my links differently on every refresh.

I see that Muxtape does something like that on their front page.

Any idea how?

Why do shows look different when rerun on different networks?

mediocre — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:44:29 -0800

Do television networks, cable or otherwise, have a "color signature" so to speak. I am looking for an explanation to a phenomenon that I see when a television show changes network, be it for syndication, relocation, etc.. I've noticed that when a tv show gets reruns shown on a cable network, or it enters syndication, whenever I see the second run episodes they just seem.. different somehow. Aside from editing for time and content, is there an explanation for this or is it purely psychosomatic?

Specifically, I am thinking of when Mr. Show moved and had occasional reruns on TBS and Comedy Central, the show just looked fundamentally different then it did when it was on HBO. The color pallet was dulled, it just appeared different in a way bigger then the new footprint logo in the corner.

11" x 17" Color Printer Recommendations

toomuchpete — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:50:48 -0800

Looking for recommendations for printing color onto 11" x 17" paper. About once a month, a colleague of mine has to print about 90 8-page newsletters. They're in color, and printed to 11" x 17" paper. We currently use an HP K8600, which works fine except that the ink doesn't dry quickly enough, resulting in some ugly smears unless the newsletters are printed one at a time, which is clearly sub-optimal.

I'm looking for some recommendations for either a) recommendations on a different printer (something less than $500 would be ideal) that would do the printing in one fell-swoop or b) ideas for dealing with this smearing problem. I searched around but didn't really find anything that looked on-point with respect to the smearing problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Scanning in 16bit or better colour?

davemee — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:52:18 -0800

Scanning in 16-bit colour. I have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 600F plugged into a Vista machine. The box says "9600 x 4800 resolution! 48-bit colour!". Scanning options in Vista (It's all WIA not Twain these days) seem to limit me to 600dpi and 8-bit colour. Am I missing something, or does anyone else have any experience of pulling off this feat with this hardware, or know why the box would seem to be claiming unfacts?

What is the best approach to reproducible color management?

teem — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:08:23 -0800

What is the best approach to color management? I only just realised that how I see my photos in iPhoto, Photoshop, and Safari isn't how the majority of people on the net are seeing them? What is the best setup for consistent color management that still looks good? Example: Smitten Kitchen versus Use real butter. Both food blogs (neither one mine) look great in Safari, but in Firefox Use real butter's pictures lose saturation, while Smitten Kitchen's remain brilliant.

What combination of setups should I use in my camera, iPhoto, Photoshop, and browser in order to color manage like Smitten Kitchen?

I read This previous question, but was keen to know if any recommendations have changed now that 2 years have passed.

right eye red left eye blue

Infernarl — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 02:53:11 -0800

When I open only my right eye things are tinted red. When I open only my left eye they are tinted blue. Is this normal? Is this a symptom of anything or is it just normal variation? I've had it for a long time. If it is normal, do other people see other colors? The effect is a lot like making a photo "warm" or "cool" in photoshop.

Maybe I shouldn't have used 3d glasses as sunglasses when I was a kid.

Red sky at night AND morning? Must be Mars!

jwells — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:47:31 -0800

I want to reconstruct Phoenix Mars lander pics in color. There are five B&W images of the same scene with the wavelength in the jpg headers (445, 485, 533, 604, 753nm). How do I combine these? There's an explanation and combined color wheel here. Funny thing is, I don't get what they get with GIMP and RGB (604, 533, 485). There's too much red and it looks darker. What am I doing wrong?

Why is Red Sacred?

Edelweiss — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:56:43 -0800

I'm trying to reconcile the significance of red cloth to the natives in Eirik the Red's Saga. Can anyone point me in the right direction? In the Saga, the Vikings are confused about the natives' interest in red cloth, which the Vikings consider worthless. My gut tells me that the natives consider the color red sacred, but I'm not having any luck at finding any scholarship to prove it. I've tried searching the obvious keywords in Google Scholar and JSTOR.

Where might I find authoritative evidence that red would have been considered sacred or valuable by native North Americans?

Please help me paint my bedroom!

atmu — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:12:49 -0800

I just moved into room in a beautiful house, but cannot for the life of me decide what color to choose. I'm looking for a natural, earthy tone - something with a sensual vibe like dark brown. The difficult part is that there is a very high ceiling, only 1 window, and 4 super huge walls. Any color I paint the walls will dominate the room. Even with furniture (bed, desk, etc...) in the room, there is still a lot of empty wall space because of the ceiling height.

The dimensions are 12ft x 15ft with 12ft high ceilings. The 1 window doesn't allow too much light in. There are 2 recessed ceiling lights, but I plan on using tinted brown lamps. The high ceilings look great but are so hard to work with. With only 1 window, there's no break in the walls. Any color I paint turns the wall into one giant square of green, red, brown, etc...

I'm thinking maybe I should only paint 1 wall or use a 2-tone scheme so that one color doesn't dominate the rooms. Maybe a dark brown behind the main wall touching my headboard, and the side walls a tan/beige.

Painting this room has been incredibly stressful as 2 colors i've tried turned out horribly. One made me feel like i was in a jungle and the other resembled the inside of Jamba Juice.

If you can suggest a name of the paint brand and color, I will be forever grateful.

Do-re-mi and Roy G. Biv

Durhey — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:45:53 -0800

Can I change the colors of MIDI events in Sonar 7's piano roll editor individually to match the notes they represent? Is it possible to make Sonar 7's MIDI piano roll display events as different colors based on what note they are? I find I can change the colors of all the events simultaneously, but not give them different colors from one another.

Ideally, I'd like an event to automatically be assigned a color that corresponds to the note it represents, so for example any event which is a "C" would be red, "D" orange, "E" yellow, etc.

Barring that, being able to manually change the colors of the events would work too, as would changing the background color of the notes horizontal line, or any other method to distinguish different notes by color. Thanks!

Automatic creation of images displaying sequential numbers

Grensgeval — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:22:02 -0800

How do I automatically create a series of images of sequential numbers? ( 01.jpg shows the number '1', 02.jpg the number '2', etc) I would prefer to do this using software for Windows. Although if need be, a Mac-only solution would do.

The file-format is of no importance, since conversion is always possible.
Image size for my use is about 500x500 pixels. Simple two-tone images are fine, although some influence on (randomization of) background color, font type/color would be even better.

I'm no guru, but have a basic understanding of Adobe's CS3 Suite and have monkeyed around with various video-editing programs (using the titler functions) as well as image-management software (e.g. ThumbsPlus) and different watermarking software to get this problem solved, but without success.

I'm sure it must be possible, even if the method is a 'dirty' way of using a program. ThumbsPlus for example can make thumbnail-sheets of images, which it then numbers, if you ask it to. However, I haven't been able to cheat this option into doing what I need.

Any ideas? Making these by hand is not going to be fun...

How can I prepare a bitmap image to print in black & white plus one spot color?

pantufla — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:43:08 -0800

How can I prepare a bitmap image to print in black & white plus one spot color? I'm doing an illustration for a magazine, and I've been given the instructions that it will print in black plus one spot color. I've scanned a drawing into photoshop (b & w) and created another masked layer with the specified spot color. My contact at the magazine does not know how to set up a photoshop file to print black & white with the one spot color. I tried creating a duotone (black plus the spot color) but that seemed to require tinting the whole image with the spot color, when I want some areas to be tinted, and some not. I tried creating a cmyk file and adding a spot channel, which allows me to tint the image selectively, but I'm not sure if that's the way to go. I'm waiting to get more info from the magazine people, but in the meantime, if you were asked to prep a bitmap (not vector) file to print in black & 1 spot color, how would you go about it? Thanks! (mac, photoshop cs3)

Why aren't there more pink cars?

ThePinkSuperhero — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:03:34 -0800

Why don't car manufacturers make pink cars? They make cars in lots of other colors (ROYGBIV, brown, black, gray, beige). And pink is an awfully popular color for gadgets these days- pink mp3 players, pink phones, pink laptops. So why aren't there more pink cars? I don't know that I've ever seen a pink car that wasn't custom painted. Is this simply an issue of there not being a market for pink cars, or are there other factors involved?

Going blue in the face over black

djgh — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:07:51 -0800

How to make InDesign export colours properly? I have an InDesign document, and on the master I have made a rectangle the size of the page, in black.

Whenever I export to PDF, this black rectangle turns grey.

I've dealt with the before, I just can't remember how - I've tried turning all image compression off, but it doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

Any help appreciated!

Where to buy colored light filters

Turtles all the way down — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:04:55 -0800

Daughter has a science fair problem. Where can I buy light filtering gels? My daughter has just let me know that her Grade 4 class is having a mini science fair...in two days. I've come up with the idea of testing whether particular visual illusions have different effectiveness under different colours of light (I'm thinking of that blue/yellow/green disk that seems to rotate; anyone have a link?). My immediate problem is how to produce the different light colours. I'm thinking of putting everything in a box and illuminating the box with a lamp shining through a coloured filter. What kind of store would sell this kind of thing? (And if it sounds like I'm going to do the whole thing, I'm not! But it's not going to get done in two evenings unless I point her in the right direction.)

How to surmount the enormous obstacle of text color?

freudenschade — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:33:35 -0800

Form Controls in Word 2007: OK, I created a form with Rich Text and Drop-Down List controls. The controls appear within a table. The question is, how do I get the resulting text (once the form is filled in) to appear in black, not gray? No matter what I try, it seems the best consistent result I can get is to change the default prompt text (i.e. "Click here to enter text") within the control to black -- which still results in gray text as soon as something is entered. This should be a simple thing to accomplish, but my usual resourcefulness has failed me.

Can you use spot channels in a duotone?

papercake — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:30:03 -0800

Working with duotones and spot channels in Photoshop question. I wanted a specific effect for this cover image I'm working with and I'm not sure whether or not my printer is going to kill me for what I'm doing, or whether I need to save the file in a specific way to make it workable.

What I've done is create a duotone (we'll say RED and BLUE colors). I then wanted to highlight two areas — one in the red and one in the blue — so I created additional spot channels for each color and did some touch up coloring.

I now have three channels: pms RED, pms BLUE, and Duotone (made up of the same pms RED & BLUE colors). Is this going to create problems at the printer and how should the file best be saved?

How do I get the colors of my video correct on this cheap lcd display?

mule — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:19:19 -0800

I have LCD displays I need to display video on, but they displays were made on the cheap and the colors display strangely. The screens have no brightness/contrast adjustment options. How do I determine the contrast ratio/gamma of these screens so that I can make adjustments to my video files? The LCD screens only accept CF card input (JPG, MPG etc) so calibration software is not an option. I can save JPGs or flat R, G, B and greys onto a CF if needed.

An example of my problem is yellows look almost red and colored (red 14px) type on a white bg is illegible.

I have Spyder2Express at me disposal and could possibly purchase a more useful gadget if it's not too expensive.

Once I have determined in which ways the LCDs are off my plan is to make the adjustments to the movie files in Apple Compressor, but I am open to other alternatives.

Yes, I HAVE TO use these LCD panels.

Is poison green?

L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:41:15 -0800

Why is green the iconic color of poison? Poison is often represented as being green. In video games, for instance, something dripping poison or a vial of poison is more likely to be green than any other color. Outside of video games, term "poison green" is sometimes used to denote a bright, slightly bluish green. Given that so many healthy foods are green, where did this association come from? Are there actual poisons, toxins, or venoms that are bright green? Absinthe doesn't count.