Rosco Creates MIXBOOK™ Digital Swatch Kit

The digital world of LED lighting has made life as a lighting designer easier in many ways.  There is one aspect, however, that has been made more difficult, and that is previsualising colour choices.  A flashlight and a Rosco gel swatchbook used to do the trick, but how do you replicate that for LED fixtures?  Using MIXBOOK™ you can now test any colour using a colour picker on a lighting console or in a lighting control app.

WHY

Selecting colours from a screen or monitor can be a very frustrating process. If you’ve ever looked at a colour picker screen like and wished for a way to actually see that colour you will want to have a MIXBOOK™.

The lighting industry has been choosing colours on the hop, possibly because up until now, there has been no digital swatchbook to assist in choosing LED colours in advance . A standard RGBW LED light has the capability of creating over 4.2 billion different colours (255 x 255 x 255 x 254). MIXBOOK™ gives lighting professionals the ability to evaluate all these colours during pre-production/design, without having to connect a cumbersome light and console every time a new colour is tested.

HOW

MIXBOOK™ communicates via Bluetooth through myMIXapp (available as a free download for iOS and Android devices) to provide a colour language that all departments can use to explore, experiment and evaluate LED colour. Through the app, users can generate the desired colour by choosing a colour in the HSI colour picker, which will provide the hue, saturation and intensity levels of the colour selected. You can choose a colour in the CIE 1931 colour space, which will provide the xy coordinates of the selected colour. From there, you can send that colour to MIXBOOK™ to actively explore the performance of the colour in an environment, and modify it until is optimised for the application.  Once the desired colour has been created, it can be saved to the cloud and captures the Hue, Saturation and Intensity levels or the xy coordinates of the colour for programming the console later.

The unique “Capture” function in the myMIX app enables users to previsualise colours from the real world using MIXBOOK™ .  Lighting professionals find inspiration from the illumination they see in the real world, and many will snap a photo of that light for reference later.  Utilising the unique Capture function of the myMIX app, users can select a portion of a photo and send that colour to their MIXBOOK™, allowing exploration of how the natural lighting colours might render when created by an LED fixture.

MIXBOOK™ contains the same six-chip LED technology found in the DMG Lumière MIX^® fixtures. This enables lighting professionals to produce the 130+ True Rosco Color™ gel matches found in the myMIX app. It’s a veryuseful tool to have along for testing light colours on site.