Picking colors in Maya is different than in many other applications.
This is because Maya emulates lighting in the real world, with a very large difference between the darkest and brightest regions.
Colors in this high dynamic range must be transformed so they look good when displayed on a device with a limited dynamic range,
such as a monitor.
This transformation gives a pleasing image because it mimics the photographic response
that we are used to from film processing and digital cameras.
In contrast, editors like Photoshop usually deal with images that have already been prepared for display,
so there's no need for this extra transformation.
You can open Maya's color chooser in a floating window by double-clicking on a swatch.
Here, you can use either the high--dynamic-range colorspace that is used for rendering
or the standard--dynamic-range colorspace that is used for display.
The numeric values that you see are automatically converted when you switch between these spaces.
They represent the values of the swatch color, before and after the view and display transforms have been applied.
The display space is often convenient for entering values. However, Maya always stores the rendering-space values in the scene.
Any existing color values in the scene are never converted when you change rendering spaces in the preferences,
so make sure that you are using the correct rendering space before choosing colors.
When you set a color using the display space,
the values that you enter are converted into the rendering space using the inverses of the display and view transforms.
These rendering-space values are what gets stored in the scene.
This gives you back the original color that you set, once the rendering space values are converted to the display space for viewing.
Of course, the appearance of the color in the final image also depends greatly on the lighting in the scene.
When using the eyedropper tool in one of Maya’s color-managed windows such as the viewport,
it picks the underlying rendering-space color.
This gives exactly the same color for display, after the view and display transforms have been applied.
Note that this can mean values well above 1, such as for pixels in the highlights.
When using Maya’s eyedropper outside of Maya, there are no underlying rendering-space values to pick
so instead it inverts the display and view transforms.
Again, this gives the same result after the view and display transforms are reapplied.
However this might not be what you want,
for example, if you are picking values for reflectance or other color properties that are physically valid only between 0 and 1.
For example, Maya’s default configuration uses a view transform with a photo-realistic response –-
monitor values of 1 correspond to a rendering- space value of about 16.
If the monitor values from the other application are close to 1, they'll give rendering-space values above 1.
In a displayed image, such a value might represent a light source or a specular highlight
but it isn't valid for a material's basic color -- an object can't reflect more light than it receives.
To pick the color from the other application to use as reflectance or a similar property,
change the view transform to Un-tone-mapped.
Do this in the preferences, and not in the viewport.
Then after you have picked a color, you can change the view transform back.
Once those color values are stored in the scene,
they won't get changed when you modify the view transform.
Thanks for watching.