Tried using a digital color picker on an old project and my whole palette fell apart

Last month I was redoing this poster I made 3 years ago for a local band in Austin. Thought I'd be smart and use a digital color picker tool to grab the hex codes from the original print. Big mistake - the monitor I was on was calibrated wrong, so all the blues looked purple on screen. Printed the first test and it came out looking like a bruise. Now I gotta redo the whole project because the band loved the old version and I can't match it. Anyone else run into this with old digital files?

2 comments

2 Comments

taylor_barnes5915d ago

The whole monitor calibration thing is a trap, right? I had a similar issue with a digital file from 2018 where the colors shifted because of software updates since then, not even the monitor. Nobody talks about how file compression over the years can mess with saved hex codes.

the_gray15d ago

I actually push back on the "file compression messes with hex codes" part. Hex codes are just text values and compression doesn't touch text data, it's the color profile mismatches between old and new software that's the real culprit.