Design Preview: images render much darker than normal (OSX only)

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What steps will reproduce the problem?
Use Design Preview to view a design/comp from your computer screen.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
We'd expect the images rendered via Design Preview to match what you would see 
if you, say, exported your designs to PNGs, saved them to the device's Gallery 
app, and viewed the images via the Gallery app.

But, it turns out that the image rendered via Design Preview are much, much 
darker than what the device would render.

Please provide any additional information below.
We recently realized that some color recommendations we made to our engineer 
were creating a result that was far lighter than we expected. It turns out that 
using Design Preview gave us a deceptively darker version of what we were 
really going to see.

We're hoping you know what the issue might be—this tool has been immensely 
helpful, but for color refinements, it might not be something we can rely on 
just yet...

Some notes: we're using Motorola devices. don't know if this is a hardware 
issue?

Original issue reported on code.google.com by gunshi...@gmail.com on 24 Jan 2012 at 9:10

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Can you provide an example image and a list of devices you've seen exhibiting 
this issue?

Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 25 Jan 2012 at 1:33

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Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 25 Jan 2012 at 1:33

• Changed state: NeedsInfo
• Added labels: Component-DesignPreview

[GoogleCodeExporter]

sure...
attached is a comparison of what i got using this on an HTC sensation. i'm also 
seeing this problem on a Motorola Razr, Motorola Droid3, and a Samsung Infuse.

here's a summary of what i did:
1. viewed an image via the Design Preview tool (in this case, a screenshot from 
the HTC phone...of an alarm notification)
2. took a screenshot of this (using HTC's screenshot function)
3. downloaded the original image file to the phone's Gallery folder
4. viewed the original image via the phone's Gallery folder
6. took a screenshot of this (again using HTC's screenshot function)
7. compared everything
I took these screenshots using HTC's screengrabbing tool

hope this helps!
-Cat

Original comment by gunshi...@gmail.com on 26 Jan 2012 at 2:24

Attachments:

• DesignPreview-darkProblem-HTCSensation-20120125.png

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Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 9 Feb 2012 at 1:37

• Changed state: Accepted

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The issue is with Robot.createScreenCapture; relevant SO thread: 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8618373 ... looking into it.

Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 9 Feb 2012 at 8:58

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Also should be noted that this seems to only affect OSX.

Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 9 Feb 2012 at 9:09

• Changed title: Design Preview: images render much darker than normal (OSX only)

[GoogleCodeExporter]

yes! i forgot to mention that i'm using OSX. is there an ETA for a fix? our 
whole design team loves this tool, but for color-critical things, we have to 
fall back to using the Gallery app.

thanks.

Original comment by gunshi...@gmail.com on 22 Mar 2012 at 10:35

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Unfortunately this relies on an underlying bug in the screencapture mechanism 
so I'm not sure it's something that I can fix in the near future.

Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 25 Mar 2012 at 2:55

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Here's the line that is taking the screenshot: 
http://code.google.com/p/android-ui-utils/source/browse/design-preview/desktop/s
rc/com/google/android/desktop/proofer/Proofer.java#358

The ideal fix would be to remove the gamma "correction" from the BufferedImage. 
I don't know if that's possible. An alternative would be to use some other 
mechanism for taking a screenshot on Mac.

Original comment by thomas.42 on 20 Sep 2012 at 2:27

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Project moved to Project moved to 
https://github.com/romannurik/AndroidDesignPreview. Please re-file if this is 
still an issue.

Original comment by romannu...@google.com on 19 May 2014 at 3:18

• Changed state: WontFix