Solutions to Most Burning Problems With Colors
Matching Colors is one of the most important issues in embroidery. We feel it's so important because
no matter how good the colors selection of original designs is - you often just have to
change the colors, to make them fit your specific project. Otherwise, the original color scheme may look
ridiculous, or even ugly.
In this issue, we'll try to cover "safe" ways to match colors, and show how to predict if a certain combination
of colors will look nice on your project.
You've probably noticed that when you download embroidery designs, and try to view them via your embroidery
software (or embroidery machine), the colors don't look like the original picture.
Sometimes the difference between original colors and what you see in "design preview" is minor. And sometimes
it is huge. This happens because each machine and software loads it's own color palette.
If you're lucky enough to purchase designs digitized in similar software to yours - you will see very close
or similar colors to the original ones. Yet, most often this doesn't happen, and you
drive crazy trying to recognize the design.
What to do?
Most decent companies that sell embroidery designs offer thread change lists that you can use as color
guides. These lists usually include color swatches, color names, and often matching numbers of thread
for popular thread brands.
In this case, all you need to do when stitching a design is open its color sheet file (usually in
graphical GIF, JPG or PDF format), and match the thread exactly in the order of thread change list.
You may even print these color sheets if you want.
Yet, how do you know whether the original colors fit your project? And if not - how to change them
to get a winning combination? There is a more or less easy and inexpensive way to do this.
Checking If The Original Color Scheme Fits Your Project
Often the original colors, suggested by digitizer, will look on your project perfectly well. So
they're worth checking, before you dive into creating your own color scheme.
To check whether the original colors fit you, take out the fabrics that you're planning to use
for your project. If it's more than one fabric - put them one near another, to see if they match.
Everything should match, not only thread colors. Also, make sure that the materials look well together.
Usually fabrics done from natural fibers go well with other natural fiber fabrics and trims, and
synthetic ones go better with synthetic "partners". But of course there are exceptions.
When you're satisfied with your basic fabrics - open Embird software, or any other embroidery
editing program that allows you to pick up your own color as design's background.
Open the embroidery design you want to use, and pick up background color that is as close as possible
to your future background fabric. Then fix design colors to match the original color scheme, using
thread change list, and see how this all looks together.
Changing Colors with Embird Software
This instruction is for Embird software. But most other programs work alike. So if you're using different software, it doesn't matter. See the steps, then go to your program,
take a look at its help section to see the exact instruction for changing colors, and practice. It is simple.
Some programs will even allow you to use a scan of your real fabric as background, to see if it matches your design. So if you're using one of those more advanced programs -
you may want to check the manual, to see how to insert a scan of your fabric to default backgrounds database
of your program. This way you won't need to eye-match background colors.
If you're using Embird - even better. Open it now, and try to do everything just as
described below.
(To open Embird, click "Start" --> "All Programs" --> "Embird").
Use the right menu to navigate to one of the embroidery designs that you have
saved on your PC. Open the design (double click on its file name).
You will see the design in front of you. It may already bee with good colors, or
you may need to adjust its colors together with color of your background fabric
(using thread change list, that comes with each of our designs). You will see the
list of colors at the bottom, under the design itself. Here's how the screen should look:
To change design background to the color of your fabric, and see how whether designs'
default colors match, do the following steps, as shown on screenshot below:
After we click on OK, we return to the design. Now, look at the
following screenshots and follow the steps below, to actually
see background color change:
Here's what we see at the end:
Because the background color we've picked up for this example relates to the same color
family as large part of the design, it looks nice. If you want to embroider this design
on dark jeans, close to this blue color, it look great with the default colors. Another
foolproof background is white.
Since we're talking about changing design colors - the only way to change one gradient
color family is to replace it with another gradient color family.
For example, if you have a natural looking design of pink rose and you want the rose to
be blue, you need to have enough blue thread cones of same shade, in different color
depth. Light blue, medium blue, dark blue etc.
Most thread brands lack a good selection of gradient colors within at
least a few important color families. To solve this problem, we offer
26 small thread kits by color families.
Each of these kits includes 10
colors from light to dark. So if you'd like to expand your selection of
gradient thread colors - check them out.
Matching Your Own Colors, If The Original Ones Don't Fit
Sometimes it's easier to change the fabric, than to update color scheme of entire embroidery
design. If you still prefer to stick to your original fabric choice - try to do the following:
Go to http://www.colormatch.dk/ or
http://www.colorblender.com/ and try to find color
suggestions, using your fabric color as base color. These tools are very nice, and absolutely
free. So unless you're blessed with natural talent for matching colors, they can help you a lot.
Avoid using too many different colors. Usually, a more than 3-4 color family in single design
is too much. If you need more colors – add lighter or darker shades within one color family.
Once you've selected 3-4 possible color schemes, try them again in your embroidery software,
by updating colors of your design until you're satisfied with how it looks.
Here is an example of alternative color schemes for this same design, just on different
background fabrics (This really isn't an instruction - just an example.) We wanted to stitch
the Rose design on dark green background fabric. When selecting it on PC screen, it's quite
clear that original color of the design just don't fit. To match new color scheme, we've
used a program called ColorImpact (fully functional demo can be downloaded here:
http://www.tigercolor.com ).
We won't explain how to use this software, because first of all it's too easy to use
for any instructions, and second - you may eventually use an absolutely different tools
for matching colors. So these screenshots are just to show the general idea. Remember -
we didn't do any manual matching. Just picked up the background color, and this lovely
ColorImpact software suggested all the other colors, which matched well!
This is the first color scheme:
And this is how our design now looks on green fabric:
Here's example of another successful color scheme:
And this is how the design looks:
Of course there are more options and color variations for this design. The leaves could be
all blue, for example, like the software suggested. We just chose to use only part of the
offered colors. So please, experiment! This is exciting and fun.
Another, really foolproof way to match colors, is to use the same color of your basic
fabrics, and play only with color intensity of thread. This method doesn't fit all designs,
some designs will look dull and boring this way, but some will look great. For example, most
of our fonts, especially antique style initials, will look wonderful if embroidered like this.
Of course everything we've suggested for matching colors doesn't even touch the top of the
iceberg of color matching art. If you're curious to find out more - you may want to get a good
book, or two, about colors.
We don't have a perfect book ourselves so won't recommend the ones we bought. Perhaps
you'll find something better. We did find two awesome programs for matching colors though.
They aren't free, but seem to be a few heads above the free tools mentioned earlier. They
both have 15 days fully functioning demos, so try them out. Both are Great, each offering
different sweet extras. Really hard to choose between them, so check by yourself which
one you like better.
You may also want to get the free ThreaDelighT polyester conversion chart (in PDF format).
This color chart includes RGB number of each thread color, so you may enter this data into
your embroidery software and use for matching thread colors.
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