Thread by @caseytube

hey kids, you like LCARS? so do I!

I recently acquired a production-made LCARS palette from the TNG/DS9 era, so I made a digital palette for all your replica needs! It's 95% accurate, for reasons I'll go into below.

sources here!
mega.nz/folder/2ognEAJ…

🧵below #StarTrek

so, here's the story with this one. last year, i bid on this really low-key auction that had a bunch of stuff from a star trek fan who owned some production pieces. amongst all that was this scrap piece of paper that had a romulan and some color palettes on it. neat!

i didn't think much of it at the time, as I was much more excited about a folder that had a ton of Johnathan Frakes' director memos/documents from Star Trek: First Contact (i promise it's a lot less creepy than it sounds) so I just put it in storage

now, i've been wanting an LCARS panel for a long time, but they're so abhorrently expensive whenever they go up for auction, so I figured i'd never get a chance at one.

LCARS, notably, use "Translite" paper which allows the paper to be backlit.

now, the paper looked glossy. but I assumed it was scraps leftover from making a graphic for a PADD or something, which maybe could explain the various LCARS buttons.

however, yesterday, i finally took it out of it's wrap, and realized that it was a lot thinner than gloss paper.

i had a little epiphany then, and thought to shine a flashlight through. it lit up like a lighthouse.

oh. my. god.

it's a translight LCARS panel! my dream collectors piece! and I've been sitting on it with no idea what it was for ages!!!

and then it all clicked! not only is this scrap left over from an LCARS panel, but it's actually a print of THE master palette for LCARS graphics in the mid TNG era.

i knew immediately what I had to do: get my scanner and run a palette off this.

see, earlier last year, i stumbled upon Doug Drexler's collection of assets on ArtStation which included some raw LCARS art from the DS9 encyclopedia and from DS9 itself, and pulled a very simple digital palette off that. but this palette I found has wayyy more colors than that.

and since I now own a copy, I can do some proper A/B comparisons and try to create a perfect printable color for modern inkjet printers. This is the type of research that's desperately needed for modern replica makers, and I'm one of the few crazy enough to do it!

some other fun notes: this panel features 3 colors per set of color (each row represents a set.) I believe the ones on the right and middle are the most common, as I almost never see the darker colors on the left. I could always be wrong, though!

this panel and others like it are a perfect example of early inkjet printers. that means stippling galore. one of the reasons why I won't be able to create a 100% 1:1 copy is because of the random nature in how these ink-dot printers work. see below:

I averaged out the color across the entire button by blurring the whole button together and sampling that. Does a decent job of simulating the source.

You can also do this yourself! I'm including the .tiff and .jpg if you aren't happy with my methods. I'm open to improvements!

now, this palette is good for anyone replicating DS9 and TNG graphics, but if you're trying to replicate anything on Voyager or the Enterprise-E, we don't have any good scans of those LCARS panels yet. they both tend to lean heavy on blue.

if anyone has any VOY or ENT-E LCARS panels they'd be willing to loan for a bit, please get in contact :) you'd make my life and the lives of others if you could help.

one last thing: hey @gaghyogi49 if you've got a minute, do you recognize this romulan? they're from pre-voyager, i'm guessing ds9 era, but could also be from tng, and might've just been an old test-pattern for getting color right on LCARS panels. if you can help, thanks!

if you've read this far, thanks. I appreciate it. I don't do this for money, just because I like these resources being available and making sure that they're preserved for generations of replicators and prop builders to come.

please share it around if you'd like, and link back to here if you can. it's appreciated.

I will be updating my prop replica wiki dedicated to Star Trek with this info soon. If you'd like to contribute, check it out here! replication-ops.com/wiki/Main_Page

the colors won't look correct anyways without backlighting, which washes all the colors out (see above) so if you're reproducing this digitally, it'll be up to you whether you want to replicate backlighting or not.