Understanding the “why” and “how” of Embroidery Design Colours
When you purchase or download a design, you see the beautiful design on the web page but when you open the design on your computer, the colours are either slightly off or absolutely terrible. Why? What did you do wrong?
You didn’t do a thing wrong, and this is something that has happened to all of us at one time or another. What has happened is that the design has been converted to a different format by the digitizer to the format you requested. When the digitizer digitizes the design, he/she selects colours for various objects within the design, usually with the colour palette of the software being used. When the design is either saved or converted into different machine formats, some colours are changed to the “closest colour” in the new format. Sometimes you will see a blue colour in the original design become a black or orange colour in a format from another machine. Ideally, when a digitizer converts a design, he or she will correct the colours to similar colours used in the original design, but this does not always happen.
In a nutshell, the colours that appear in your software will be different than what you saw on the website if the design has been converted from the original format. The reason for that can be very complicated, but it all boils down to one thing – the size and scope of the design format colour palette.
Okay, you say, but what is a format? The format is the language your machine understands, i.e. .pes, .hus, vip., .jef, pcs., .dst, as a sample of some of the many available formats. Each of the many formats available was created by the machine manufacturer and these do not always speak to other formats in the same way.
Within each format is a colour palette containing the colours used by that format. The size of the colour palette for each software manufacturer can be from very large to very small and it will differ from format to format. As an example, the format for the Viking/Husqvarna (.hus) sewing machines has only 28 colours, whereas the palette for the Brother (.pes)sewing machines has 99 colours. The software for Janome (.jef) machines is very large, containing more than 100 colours. Different formats have different sizes of colour palettes because each was created at a certain time, by a specific company. Each format has a different number of colours contained in its palette based on the capabilities of the format.
At times there are machine companies that have a variety of formats, such as the Husqvarna Viking "family." At the beginning of their foray into the home embroidery market, there were only a small number of colours available in the original .hus format. Over time new formats have been added, such as .shv and .vip, each of which have more colours available in their palettes, allowing colours to be more accurately represented.
That is all well and good, but what do you do when you have the incorrect colours? The first thing is to be very sure that you download a colour chart with the design. If there is no colour chart provided with the design, be sure to contact the digitizer and request the colour chart. You may also want to take a screenshot of the design on the web page, as that will give you a representation of the colours used by the digitizer.
Most embroiderers do not have all the colours of every thread manufacturer, so when embroidering a design, usually the colours are chosen by comparing the actual colours used by the digitizer to those you currently have available or changes can be made to the design colours to reflect your own personal taste.
Colour Changing Designs in Embird
With the advent of Embird 2003 and with every new build after that, there is a very quick and easy way to change colours by creating a text file. If you read the article “.dst Files and Embird” you will find information on how to create a text file for designs in Embird.
Trouble shooting tips when it just won’t work:
- Be very sure to save both the embroidery file and text file in the same folder.
- Open Embird. In Manager, click on Options and make sure that "Support Palette
- Files" is checked.
- If the design still doesn’t colour change, check to make sure you don’t have any errors in the text file, correcting the errors and resaving the text file, if necessary.
- If the colours still don’t change, in Manager direct Embird to the folder that contains the design and text file of the colour change sheet.