Cardinal RGB

[John Rofrano]

[Tyson Onaga] “Need to add a Sony color object (USC’s colors). USC is supposed to use Cardinal Red. According to wiki, this is 196, 30, 58. This looks too pink to me.”

It looks red to me. Perhaps you need to calibrate your monitor. Mine are calibrated with a Spyder 3 Elite colorimeter. How are yours calibrated?

[Tyson Onaga] “If anything USC “red” looks more like maroon which is 128, 0, 0″

If you use the color eye dropper in Vegas’ Solid Color Generated media you’ll see that the Wikipedia page has a swatch that is actually 153,0,0 and they are calling it Cardinal Red so they are obviously wrong. If you take a sample from the actual logo on the Wikipedia page, the top logo is 152,27,30 while the bottom word logo is 149,54,81 which does look pink to me.

So your confusion is well founded. That one Wikipedia page shows three different colors, none of which are cardinal red. I say, use 196, 30, 58 if you want to be authentic otherwise use what you like. But don’t choose a color if you displays aren’t calibrated for accurate color reproduction or you are fooling yourself.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Tyson Onaga]

I asked my Trojan friend (grad) and she thinks it is too pink so I will use 153,0,0.
Once again … thanks much!

[John Rofrano]

You’re welcome.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Tyson Onaga]

I had completely forgotten about that Vegas color picker. Using the USC website (I presume they have the right colors on their own page) USC red is 153, 0, 0. USC gold is 255, 204, 0.

In fact, to get a college/university colors or pro team (NFL, NBA, MLB, …), it is probably easiest/best to go their site and use the color picker to grab the actual RGB values as opposed to relying on a wiki page which may or may not be correct.