Color Correcting an Appearance by Changing its Luminosity

All components and assemblies in Solidworks can have their appearance altered by applying colors, surface finishes, or even textures to a face, feature, component, or even subassembly (depending on context). For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be focusing on color correction in a part, but the concepts covered here can be applied to any appearance editing operation.

There are multiple ways to tweak a component’s color, but here we’ll focus on tweaking an appearance’s illumination settings, specifically the appearance’s luminosity. Luminosity essentially refers to a color’s brightness. Here’s an example of how the luminosity of your part can make a difference in the way your model appears:

We can see that even though the color that we’ve chosen is a fairly bright shade of yellow, the color that we see applied to our part is almost like a dark greenish-yellow color. This is obviously unideal, we’d like to see the color that we’ve chosen displayed properly so that we can create renders of our project that will accurately portray what we want it to look like.

The easiest way to correct this is to simply change the luminosity of our appearance. To do this, make sure that you first have the “Advanced” options turned on in the Appearance PropertyManager.

Once the Advanced Options are turned on, choose the “Illumination” tab to access the specular and luminosity parameters.

Here, there are multiple options to change the brightness and light reflectivity of your appearance (we recommend using the “Dynamic Help” checkbox to gain further information on what each option actually does). Here you can change the Luminous Intensity of your appearance. Below are some different luminosity settings and how they will affect our yellow appearance from before:

We can see that as the luminosity (“Luminous Intensity”) increases, our yellow becomes more and more bright. We can actually see that at 1 w/srm^2 of luminosity, our appearance may even be too bright, so perhaps we’d simply decrease the luminosity back down to 0.5 w/srm^2 to get the appearance we’d like.

There are other lighting tricks that you can play with in order to get the final result that you’d like, but changing the luminous intensity is an extremely easy way to perform basic color correction on your part’s appearance.

If, for some reason, changing the luminous intensity of your color does not brighten the appearance at all, please contact Hawk Ridge Systems technical support at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada).