Testing RGB leds and Printing

This morning I did tests to see for myself how different colours show up on print with different colours light like in Carnovsky's work. I didn't expect it to work though because I couldn't print true cyan, magenta, and yellow colours since they were out of gamut for printing. I need to know more about colour management and printing to see if there's a way to get around this.

There's a simple Arduino circuit I set up. There really should be some resistors on each leg of the RGB led, but since this is a quick test I'll skip out on those for now. As you can see here the printed colours aren't the ones I want. I folded up the paper so that the light can be contained in the box so that I can see what it's doing to the colours better.

The red worked really well, which surprised me. As expected cyan turns black when red light is shone on it. So if we're using red light it can turn out pretty good.

Green and blue light however, didn't work well at all. But they did turn Magenta and yellow to black respectively.

I tried it out with highlighters too on the off chance that maybe it would work or at least look interesting. Didn't really work though and the results were garish. Highlighters are not an option.

With the RGB led I also looked at cycling through the colours. I found an example by jamesotron (2013) which is a small, clear piece of code that makes it easy to understand how it cycles through the colours. Basically it fades each of the three colours at different times, which give you the smooth transitions. At this stage I don't need the colour transition because it's not necessary yet. Maybe it would be something to consider if we still use RGB and connect it up to the gears to move through the spectrum.


Reference List

jamesotron. (2013). Arduino sketch to cycle and RGB LED through the colour spectrum. Retrieved May 16, 2013, from https://gist.github.com/jamesotron/766994