Previewing Remarkable Pro Colors More Accurately on Screen

The Remarkable Pro tablet's color capabilities present an interesting paradox: while the addition of color is welcome, the extremely limited palette and muted output create challenges when transferring artwork to other devices. The colors appear notably different when exported compared to their appearance on the tablet itself, often breaking the original artistic intent. This led to an exploration of methods to better preview and adjust for the tablet's unique color characteristics.

The Basic Color Extraction Approach

The method employed to capture the tablet's color characteristics wasn't particularly sophisticated, but it yielded usable results. The process involved taking photographs of the tablet alongside a white reference card using a DSLR camera, with the setup positioned under medium, indirect sunlight to minimize glare. The Remarkable Pro's backlight was kept at a medium setting to maintain balance for typical indoor usage conditions.

These photographs were then compared on a calibrated LCD screen against the actual tablet display, providing a quick visual verification of the color capture accuracy. While a full color reference card would have been ideal, the available white reference card served as a reasonable starting point for the color extraction process.

Understanding the Real Pen Colors

The actual pen colors available on the Remarkable Pro reveal some surprising characteristics. Most notably, the "white" color appears as a decidedly gray tone, significantly darker than what users might expect. This isn't merely a display artifact but a fundamental characteristic of the tablet's color reproduction.

This darker white necessitates the use of backlight in most viewing conditions, which in turn introduces a subtle blue shift to the black tones. The color palette includes:

• White: #a8aaa7 (appears as gray)
• Black: #3a4861 (slightly blue-shifted)
• Blue: #3c5483
• Red: #866369
• Green: #6e7860
• Yellow: #a09e66
• Cyan: #5f6d80
• Magenta: #7f627b

Creating a Color Profile for Soft-Proofing

Given the discrete nature of the tablet's color palette, the theoretically correct approach for color simulation would involve replicating the exact conversion logic used by the Remarkable: likely involving auto-contrast followed by quantized dithering with the fixed color palette. However, this approach would require developing a dedicated viewer or plugin, which wasn't the primary goal.

Instead, the aim was to create something practical that would allow for hue and contrast adjustments with immediate visual feedback. The solution involved using Argyll to build a color profile indirectly through a test chart, following established procedures for this type of color characterization.

The resulting ICC profile can be used for soft-proofing in image editing software that supports this feature, such as GIMP. When used in "perceptual" rendering mode, the soft-proof provides results that are reasonably close to the actual tablet output. The process in GIMP involves:

1. Loading the profile via "Image -> Color Management -> Soft-proof profile"
2. Setting the rendering intent to "perceptual"
3. Enabling "View -> Color Management -> Proof colors"

Sample Comparisons and Results

The soft-proofing approach produces results that are "not too far off" from the actual tablet output, though some limitations remain. Notably, there's an unintended shift of blues toward violet in the simulation results, though this wasn't significant enough to warrant repeating the profiling process or making adjustments.

It's worth emphasizing that using a color profile for this type of simulation isn't ideal, given how the tablet processes images. The proper approach would involve the quantized dithering logic, but the profile method provides a practical compromise for making adjustments before exporting to the tablet.

Sample images demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, showing original images alongside soft-proof versions and versions with soft-proof plus dithering. The dithering addition brings the simulation much closer to the final appearance on the tablet. One particularly illustrative example shows how adjusting an image can dramatically improve its appearance on the tablet: grass that appears brown in the unadjusted version becomes more green in the adjusted version, with better preservation of detail in areas like fields that would otherwise be crushed by the limited palette.

Practical Applications and Downloadable Resources

The practical value of this work lies in its ability to help users adjust images before exporting them to the tablet, ensuring better visual results. This is particularly useful for:

• Exporting doodles while preserving their intended appearance
• Adjusting photos for digital frame display on the tablet
• Optimizing images to work within the tablet's limited color capabilities

The downloadable resources include:

• Color Profile: rmpro-v0.icc - The ICC profile for soft-proofing
• GIMP Palette: rmpro-palette.gpl - The discrete color palette for reference

Broader Impressions of the Remarkable Pro

Beyond the color work, the author shares comprehensive impressions of the Remarkable Pro based on extensive use alongside the Remarkable 2. The pen precision remains a significant limitation, with the digitizer unable to match the accuracy of traditional pen and paper. Even continuing a stroke in handwriting feels unreliable, and this seems to have worsened compared to the Remarkable 2.

The pressure sensitivity also requires more force than comfortable to achieve varying line widths, a limitation that persists across both tablet versions and hasn't seen meaningful improvement over the years despite being adjustable in most digital painting applications.

On the positive side, the pen shapes are well-designed and functional, and the eraser works precisely as expected. The display responsiveness improvement in the Pro makes a noticeable difference in navigation speed, often making it the preferred device for reference material while the Remarkable 2 handles writing tasks.

However, the display darkness presents significant challenges. The Remarkable 2's white, while not matching regular paper, was usable in various lighting conditions. The Pro's gray appearance requires backlight use almost constantly, and the backlight itself has a noticeable blueish tint with corner bleed that's particularly problematic for night reading.

Software Interface Limitations

The software interface presents several frustrations, particularly around document management. The notebook synchronization only occurs when closing a notebook, preventing users from viewing their last written page on one device while working on the next page on another device. This limitation undermines the dual-tablet workflow that many users might expect.

The page management interface is particularly cumbersome. Instead of simple drag-and-drop functionality, moving pages requires a multi-step process: holding to select (taking about a second), choosing "Move," selecting a destination, and then choosing "before or after." Moving pages between notebooks adds even more complexity, requiring navigation through nested menus that seem unnecessarily complicated.

The mobile app shares similar limitations, lacking drag-and-drop functionality for page rearrangement. While it at least shows the "Move out" action directly without the extra menu layer, the small screen size makes it impractical for serious document management anyway.

The web interface provides basic notebook organization but lacks page previews and has limited functionality. The browser extension for importing PDFs only works with Chrome and performs poorly, limiting its usefulness.

The Linux Ecosystem Challenge

The author's experience as a Linux user highlights another significant issue: the gradual erosion of the open-source ecosystem that initially attracted them to the Remarkable platform. When the Remarkable 2 was purchased in late 2021, tools like Remy provided excellent functionality. However, software updates have progressively broken these third-party interfaces.

The current state requires enabling "Developer mode" to use tools like rmview for screen sharing, which now displays ominous warnings about reduced security. Meanwhile, the official software continues to upload documents to the cloud without end-to-end encryption, creating an ironic security situation.

This tension between the platform's initial open-source promise and its current closed nature represents a broader challenge for users who value both the hardware capabilities and the software flexibility that made e-ink tablets appealing in the first place.