Dear all,
I was thinking to myself and talking to my boss about this material
database. You will know that the ColourPicker on LUXAL.eu has
somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 entries, the majority of which are
screen scraped from various web sites. Since I have now idea how the
RGB values for those colours were determined (measured, guessed, gamma
etc), they can't really be relied upon.
This leaves us with Jan's RAL materials (I'll put them up soon), and
the Building Materials which are taken from Adeline and are hopefully
correctish, although I have no idea just how good they are. Moreover,
I am potentially infringing on somebody's copyright by putting them up
on a web site. Need to check this. Who owns the Adeline intellectual
property now? Does somebody have a contact into Fraunhofer Bauphysik?
Anyhow. We in LEARN have one of these:
http://www.atecorp.com/Equipment/Minolta/CR300.asp
I also made up an RS232 cable, have some LabView code, and know the
serial protocol. So here is an offer to those of you who are based in
or around London:
You may borrow the meter for one week free of charge, provided that:
a) Your company will assure us in writing that if anything should
happen to the instrument, we will receive a replacement. No pay-off.
An actual instrument.
b) You will share all your measurements with the Radiance community.
c) I have a small collection of about 3000-4000 colour samples from
various paint manufacturers here (the ones you find at your local
builder's merchant). You agree to input some of them too, so they can
be added to the database. Once the software is cobbled together, which
should not be too hard, the actual measurement takes about one second
for each sample. What is somewhat more time consuming is the input of
colour names, codes, swatch numbers etc, although this could
potentially be semi-automated with some scanning/OCR scripts.
You are also welcome to come and visit us in Holloway Road and do some
colour measurements there. We'll find a desk for you.
If you think you can contribute with writing the software, scanning,
OCR or anything else, please do get in touch. It's a rather laborious
exercise...
Oh, one last thing: We won't be able lend the instrument before
January because of the scheduling of the academic year and the student
projects.
Cheers
Axel