Is it my imagination, but...

[Six of Twelve]

...does the red of the command track uniform vary in shade?

Janeway's uniform almost always is maroon/burgundy, but Chakotay and Tom seem to sometimes be the same shade as Janeway, but in other episodes, it looks more like primary, basic red. I seem to recall Sisko's uniform in the earlier seasons of DS 9 tending to primary red, too.

Similarly, the engineering yellow sometimes looked primary yellow, and other times, closer to a mustard shade

I don't think it was just the different lighting in different scenes, but that they weren't consistent with the colors.

 

[Catarina]

I'd have to take a look. Let's list possibilities. Here are some off the top of my head. The TV colors are different, the devices you use are different, stage lighting can be different. your eyes. Also, and this is what I suspect, is unless they are making these clothes cut from the same bolt that has the same dye lot, there will be variation in shade.

 

[Six of Twelve]

I'd have to take a look. Let's list possibilities. Here are some off the top of my head. The TV colors are different, the devices you use are different, stage lighting can be different. your eyes. Also, and this is what I suspect, is unless they are making these clothes cut from the same bolt that has the same dye lot, there will be variation in shade.

I'm going to go with dye lot. They probably each had more than one set of uniforms over the seven year stretch.

 

[Triskelion]

You also have higher quality, better-fitting hero costumes and lesser quality, worse-fitting extra costumes.

 

[Thomas Eugene]

If you guys follow my wallpaper thread, you can sometimes notice what OP has brought up. Most of the time, I just lack the patience to equalize the colours - it takes too much time and ultimately I don't think that a variation in shades is a very big problem -, so I usually put those characters in red (or yellow) uniform in different wallpapers for the same episode.
But yes, it is true that most of the time, even within one episode there's a noticeable difference in the shades of the same uniform colour. Most of the time it is the lighting although sometimes the fact that not every (original) screencap can be of the same quality accounts for this. I don't know if you've noticed that Voyager gets way too many scenes (compared with DS9 for example) where the lighting is less than sufficient so this makes making pictures difficult not only because of the various shades but also because you can hardly see the characters in a lot of scenes at all! Voyager obviously finds herself more often than not in a "red alert" situation or for some other reason they have to decrease the intensity of the lighting so colours change dramatically. Take EQUINOX, for example. This is an episode I would really like to start making wallpapers for but nearly two thirds of the episode takes place in the dark so this will be a tough one.
It is also true that even within an episode with zero to little variation in the intensity of lighting, the colours can display different shades. This is often due to the fact that the actors are lit from different angles or if they are lit from the same angle, then one of them is standing further away from the lighting point and the shade of the uniform slightly changes. But sometimes, this has simply to do with the fact that a character's uniform is creased (in a battle or something) more than that of other characters so the shade again changes very quickly.
So all in all, I think it's a safe bet that colour is a sensitive thing and you can't always get it perfect in every scene.
At the same time, I would really be interested to know if the actors had more than just one uniform. I remember Robert Duncan McNeill once saying that his first memory re VOY is always that as the show progressed, the uniforms had to be adjusted every season (I guess they were gaining weight - maybe gaining and losing weight) so I automatically assumed that every actor had just one uniform that had to be adjusted. But then they wore those uniforms so often that maybe they needed a whole set of them - if that was the case, then it further complicates the problem of the uniform colour.

 

[Six of Twelve]

I'd say they had to have had more than one uniform, as they worked long hours filming and that it no doubt got hot on the set. They needed extras so they'd have one to wear while others were in the wash.

 

[2takesfrakes]

It does seem as though there are various shades of dye being used for the uniforms. I suspect this was done because, as Thomas mentioned, the way scenes are shot sometimes, it's easier to see crewmen in brighter shades, when they're in shadow. Inevitably, perhaps, these uniforms don't remain discreet and used for their sole purpose. They find themselves in rotation, eventually, being used when they ought not to, just because they're available.

 

[Sophie74656]

When we went to Las Vegas we went on the behind the scenes tour at the Star Trek experience. One of the things they talked about were the uniforms which they said were actual screen used costumes. When you see them in person they are almost purple. The explination is that for filming at the time of TNG they had to be purple in real life to come across as red on US televisions. I know technology has greatly improved since then but I wonder if there was still something like that at the time of filming Voyager that would account for that.

 

[Drob]

Thanks for the info Sophie, every time I calibrate my TV for Voyager I have to do a lot of fiddling about with hue and rebalancing the r,g,b values separately afterwards to compensate. I tend to forget each uniform is probably inconsistent between actors and takes.

Voyager variations look like its mostly down to the material reflectivity from wear and washing (fresnel) on the uniforms or if they used gold bounce cards on the actors for their over shots. If anybody's worked in film/tv can they confirm bounce card & lighting continuity for this show?

This used to be an annoyance with TNG I remember. The only tip to get the colors close to consistant is to use the new TNG remastered red as a reference chart and adjust for Voy and its whacky Ntsc broadcast palette. TNG red is still slightly rosy for my liking even after remastering and Voy is no better. No matter what you do the reds are always slightly off and if you do a hue adjust remember to set the green values correctly for skin-tones. This process messes with the Doctors cerulean blue uniform, it's always looked teal-blue on PAL over here but at least the crews skin looks Human and not Vulkan

Throw in wear and tear, overhead lighting changing per shot, bounce cards moving about and the problems with 90's video mastering and broadcast color tweaks its a legacy problem every major show has had since CRT Tvs fell out of fashion & I imagine any Voy remastering would have to color correct scene by scene to compensate these variations. Also to me it looks to me like they altered the makeup to compensate for the broadcast colors, but thats another topic.


My trek theory for the variations: The crew is responsible for replicating their own uniforms and don't have enough rations for new threads at varying times due to Voyagers predicament. Either that or they had Neelix washing their clothes in the mess hall with various roots and detergents he cooked up