Color

Spectralite does not send your authored red, green, and blue values straight to the lights. You author a color once, and for each fixture the engine works out how to reproduce that same color on the emitters that fixture actually has. An emitter is one of the colored elements a fixture mixes with: the red, green, and blue channels of a par, plus any white, amber, lime, or other channels a richer fixture carries. The result is that one color reads as itself across a rig of mismatched lights. Put a warm amber on an RGB par, an RGBW wash, and a color-mixing mover at the same time, and all three show the amber you picked rather than three different guesses at it.

That consistency is the point of the color model, and it is what the rest of this page explains: the three ways to author a color, the one control that governs how a color is mixed when a fixture has emitters to spare, how the engine keeps a color inside what each fixture can physically reach, and, for readers who want it, how a fixture's measured profile feeds real data into the solve. To author these colors in the app, see the Color panel reference; this page is the concept behind it.

Three ways to author a color

Every color you author uses one of three modes, chosen with the xyY, Channels, and Temp tabs on the color. The three are not three flavors of the same thing. Two of them describe a color by how it looks and let the engine solve it onto each fixture; the third describes a color by the exact channel levels to send. Which you reach for depends on whether you want a look that travels across your rig or an exact recipe on known hardware.

xyY

xyY is the portable color, and the one to reach for when you want a look to hold across different fixtures. You give a point in the CIE 1931 color space, a standard map of every color the eye can see, as an x and y coordinate (the chromaticity, meaning the hue and saturation) together with a luminance (how bright). Because the coordinate names a perceived color rather than a set of channel levels, the engine can solve the same xyY value onto whatever emitters each fixture carries. A single stored xyY color drives an RGB par, an RGBW strip, and a CMY mover to the same visible result. New colors start in this mode.

Temp

Temp authors white, described the way stage and film lighting has always described it: a color temperature in kelvin, from warm tungsten around 3200 K to cool daylight past 6000 K, plus a green-to-magenta tint for the small correction real white light usually needs. Under the hood a temperature resolves to a point on the blackbody curve and is then treated exactly like an xyY color, so it travels across fixtures the same way. Reach for Temp whenever the look you want is a white rather than a saturated color; it is the natural control for washes, key light, and anything you would otherwise dial in as a color temperature.

Channels

Channels is the escape hatch. Instead of describing a color and letting the engine solve it, you set each emitter's level yourself: red, green, blue, white, amber, UV, and any extra roles a fixture carries such as lime, cyan, or the cyan, magenta, and yellow flags of a subtractive mover. Nothing is solved and nothing is reconciled across fixtures; what you set is what leaves on the wire. Reach for Channels when you want an exact recipe, when you need to drive a single emitter on its own (UV alone, or a specific white), or when you are working on one known fixture and want no interpretation between you and it. Colors from projects made before the portable modes existed are all Channels colors, and they render exactly as they always did.

The Quality control, from Bright to Pure

A fixture with only red, green, and blue emitters can reach a given color exactly one way. A fixture that also carries a white or an amber can reach the same color several ways: lean on the white, or blend the primaries, or something in between. All of those recipes look identical to the eye, which is what makes the choice free to expose as a control. Two different emitter mixes that produce the same visible color are called metamers, and this control chooses between them.

That control is the Quality slider, and it runs from Bright at one end to Pure at the other. It applies to both xyY and Temp colors. Bright favors the recipe with the most total output: every capable emitter contributes, and the fixture puts out as much light as it can for that color. Pure leans on the emitters closest to the target, so a white lands on a dedicated white emitter instead of a red-green-blue blend, which gives a cleaner white and better color rendering at some cost in raw output. New colors default to Pure.

Because the two ends are metamers of the same target, you can sit anywhere between them and still be on color. This matters for gradients and blends: as a value sweeps from one Quality setting to another, or as two layers with different Quality settings mix, the color the audience sees stays put and only the way it is produced shifts underneath. You never trade correctness for the setting.

Rendering across different fixtures

No two fixtures reproduce the same range of color. A fixture's reachable range, its gamut, is fixed by its real emitters: three primaries reach one triangle of colors, a fourth or fifth emitter widens it, and a fixture simply cannot produce a color outside that boundary. Spectralite builds each fixture's gamut from its actual primaries and holds every color inside it.

When an authored xyY or Temp color falls outside what a fixture can reach, the engine does not send something wrong or clamp a channel arbitrarily. It clips the color to the nearest color that fixture can actually produce, moving as little as possible from the target. A deep-saturated blue that one fixture can hit and another cannot will render as that fixture's closest blue rather than as garbage, so a wash stays even across a stage of mismatched lights instead of one fixture jumping off-color. This clipping is the machinery behind the promise at the top of the page: the reason one authored color reads as itself everywhere is that each fixture renders the closest version it can honestly reach.

Channels colors skip all of this. They are literal drives, so there is no gamut to clip against and no solve to run; the levels you set are the levels that go out.

Calibration and fixture profiles

This section is for readers who want to know what feeds the solve. You can author color all day without it. The short version: when a fixture's profile carries the manufacturer's measured color data, Spectralite uses that real data instead of generic assumptions, and it is honest about how much data it has and how good it is.

A fixture profile can come from a GDTF file, the standard exchange format for fixture definitions (see importing GDTF). Beyond the channel layout, a GDTF file can carry measured colorimetric data for each emitter: its exact chromaticity (the precise x and y of that fixture's real red, not a nominal red), its relative brightness against the fixture's brightest emitter, and a response curve describing how the emitter's output tracks its control level. When that data is present, the solver builds its picture of the fixture from the measured numbers rather than from generic ones, so the color it targets is computed against the emitters this fixture really has. A measured response curve also corrects each emitter's dimming behavior, so a solved level lands where the manufacturer measured it to land rather than assuming a straight ramp. When a profile ships no measured data, Spectralite falls back to sensible defaults drawn from a large survey of real fixtures, so an uncalibrated fixture still renders reasonably.

Spectralite tracks where each piece of color data came from and how trustworthy it is. For every emitter it records the provenance of the chromaticity: whether the profile named that emitter directly (the strongest binding), whether it was matched by its color, or whether no usable data was found and a default was substituted. It also classifies each profile into a data-quality tier, from a profile with real measured chromaticities down to one that declares color mixing but carries no emitter data at all. Because real GDTF files in the wild sometimes carry placeholder, transposed, or physically impossible chromaticities, Spectralite validates every emitter's color against the visible spectrum: a coordinate that lands outside the range of real light is pulled back onto the boundary of what the eye can see before it ever reaches the solve, and the correction is recorded.

Be clear about the boundary of what this is. Spectralite consumes the fixture manufacturer's measured profile data; it does not offer a per-unit white-balance tool where you measure your specific fixture and enter corrections. "Calibration" here means honoring declared measurements and tracking their provenance and quality, not calibrating each physical unit yourself. Spectralite also does not do spectral rendering. The subtractive mixing used for CMY fixtures in particular is a color-space approximation of how their filters combine, exact at the extremes and a smooth estimate between them, not a wavelength-by-wavelength reconstruction. It is accurate enough to hold a CMY mover on color alongside your LED fixtures, and it is not a spectrophotometric model. Where the data is thinner or the physics is approximated, the engine stays honest about it rather than overclaiming.

Preset colors, gradients, and the color library

The Color panel authors three project-wide preset colors, the primary, secondary, and tertiary, that effects reference throughout a show. Edit one here and every effect using it updates at once, so you can restyle a whole show from one place. Each preset is a gradient rather than a single value, which lets an effect sweep across a run of colors. A gradient authored in xyY or Temp is blended in the physical color space between its stops, so the intermediate colors are the ones real light mixing produces rather than a naive average of channel values.

The swatches above each preset color are the color library, Spectralite's equivalent of a gel swatch book: named, familiar colors you can pick from and apply, the same physical anchor a filter number gives on a traditional rig. Click a swatch to apply it, or open the full set to browse, import, and manage libraries. See the Library Manager for organizing them, and the color nodes for referencing preset colors inside an effect.

Related

• Core Concepts: where color sits in the full signal flow.
• Output: how resolved color leaves the machine as DMX.
• Color panel: author preset colors and gradients.
• Importing GDTF: where measured fixture profiles come from.
• Color nodes: reference preset colors inside an effect.
• Library Manager: manage color libraries and swatches.