More colors out of my lights

[shinydiamond]

Hi,
I've been trying to get different shades of the same color by changing the color on the color palette and then dragging it down to the string, however all I get at the lights is the same color with a different brightness.  On the computer it looks different in the rendering but the lights themselves only change in brightness.  For instance, I was trying to do lime green side by side with forest green and all that happens is one green is brighter than the other but it's the same green (have asked a few people to confirm to make sure it's not my eyes).  I've tried this with numerous colors and always get the same shade of color.

I seem to only be able to get the colors that Xlights defaults to in that top color bar.  Am I doing something wrong in Xlights or could there be a problem with my lights/controller?  I thought RGB lights could generate thousands of color possibilities?

[deplanche]

Under each model in xlights, there is a Dimming curve that can be set.  In there, you may want to adjust the gamma.  Try a value of 2.  That helps things on the lights better match what is on the screen.  However, keep in mind that the lights and the screen are never going to be identical.

[JonB256]

I seem to only be able to get the colors that Xlights defaults to in that top color bar.  Am I doing something wrong in Xlights or could there be a problem with my lights/controller?  I thought RGB lights could generate thousands of color possibilities?

Are you looking at the pixels themselves or at a reflection or through something to diffuse the light?
Also, distance makes a difference. When you are close to the bare pixels, you don't really see the "blending" needed to get the final color.

[shinydiamond]

Thank you both for the feedback and suggestions.

I tried the dimming curve but I couldn't see any change to my lights at all.

To be clear, this isn't an issue of the computer colors not quite matching.  I'm trying to get deeper darker shades of colors.  Has anyone had luck getting a dark green?  How about a deep blood red?  A deep forest green to correctly replicate a tree?  I thought there were millions of color possibilities with RGB lights?  The darker the shade I try to get, the dimmer the bulb gets until the bulb may have the right shade but the brightness is so low that you can't see it.

I've spent some time playing around with the setting in Xlights where you can use the sliders to change to manually change the RGB values and have come to the determination that the darker colors I'm looking for just aren't possible with my lights.  The lights I have are the Brilliant Bulbs from holidaycoro:
http://www.holidaycoro.com/Brilliant-Bulb-p/709.htm

There's also a highlight fader located there which doesn't do anything at all for me.  Is it supposed to?

Thanks again for any suggestions!!

[deplanche]

Some colors just can't be done with LED lights that we use.  Browns and gray are difficult.  You might not be able to get those deep colors.

[shinydiamond]

That is unfortunate if that is really the case.  A google search shows that RGB lights can do 16,777,216 colors.  All those colors and no Deep dark shades of green, red and as you mentioned brown and grey.  I never cared for the look of pure LED Christmas lights and was hoping that RGB would give me the ability to have my lights look more like the incandescent bulbs that have a richer color profile.  I'm not really interested in getting those colors outside of the RGB triangle, but darker shades of Red and Green would be desirable.

[Gilrock]

Just do a really slow ramp from 0 to 255 in the green channel.  What you see will be your only possibilities for green.  Dark green should just be a lower value of the green channel with 0 for the other channels.  Also you seem to indicate dimming curves are doing nothing which means you probably didn't make them change the value enough for your eye to detect it.  Your eyes are very resilient to the changes in light.  As you dim the output your iris will open up to compensate.  And if you mean the only screen look doesn't change well that's true because we do a reverse calculation of the dimming curve to display the only screen effects so that they don't look so dim.