Some questions about how WebCoRE handles colors

I had a routine in the Hue app that changed their LED strip dark blue at night and bright yellow/white in the daytime for my aquarium.

It worked great, but I decided I wanted a bit more control and tried recreating the routine with webCoRE.

The automation itself works fine, but the color options in webCoRE are confusing and I can’t get the color exactly how I want it.

Part of the issue is it seems the HSL settings in webCoRE are different from traditional HSL in graphic design. Specifically, the “L” part, which webCoRE treats as a Level (basically how dim or bright the light itself is), whereas traditionally the “L” is supposed to be Lightness (which is basically the range of color from dark to pure white).

For example, if my HSL is 0, 100, 100 it should be pure white (the “L” is at 100% “lightness”). But in webCoRE, it just looks red with the LEDs at maximum brightness. The “H” and “S” are correct, but I can’t adjust the lightness of the color… only the brightness of the light itself.

By messing around with Color Temperature I can get kinda close to what I want since 4200k is white and there are various shades of color going up and down from there, but it always looks slightly green when I use it since Color Temperature adds additional yellows and blues.

Ultimately, the color I’m trying to make (for the Daytime setting) is kind of like a light pinkish orange, like this: http://hslpicker.com/#ffdac7

I can get that color in the Hue app and it looks great in my aquarium, like warm sunlight. But in webCoRE the closest I can get looks more like this: http://hslpicker.com/#ffeb99

Anyway, hopefully this all made sense. I’m loving webCoRE so far, but the color options are kind of confusing and I’m struggling a bit!

I’m not expert on the color stuff.

It might be interesting for you to play around with the expression evaluator

for example

{hslTohex(h,s,l)} and see what hex #rrggbb comes back to perhaps narrow down where the problem is…

Of course someone is more expert on the webcore colors should weigh in…

Check out this post on the webcore forum. The last post created a piston to capture the current color of a bulb which may help you determine the color of the bulb when set by your hue and then you can enter that info into your piston.

May or may not work.

But you should post over on the webcore forum to see if anyone there has any thoughts.

I tried that, but unfortunately it still gets “Level” wrong when I apply the results to my aquarium piston.

The probably isn’t really WebCoRE, but SmartThings - which has been inconsistent about the definition of Capability “Color Control” for years.

It once accepted both “#rrggbb” hex string, as well as (hue, saturation), as well as both simultaneously (thus leaving it ambiguous as to which should “win”), and then was slimmed down to just Hue and Saturation (+ brightness), and recently it looks like they reverted or perverted it to taking both again; with no explanation.

They also redundantly added in the switch() command to the Capability. Why? No good reason I can think of except to perhaps ensure that Switch and Color could be set absolutely simultaneously?

The latest official specification should be this one… Enjoy! (Beware: There is often very little quality control on DHs, so any particular brand of color light may or may not implement this Capability to any degree of conformance or consistency, even if Claimed. And who can blame them if the specification itself is ambiguous and unstable?).

https://smartthings.developer.samsung.com/docs/api-ref/capabilities.html#colorcontrol