does this give you problems with other variables that lscolor loads or is it only this particular variable? does it work if you hard code the color value into the step instead of the variable? does it work if you change the system color that 3dLight points to? are you loading lscolor well before grdmagick? (lscolor needs a short bit of time to register all the color variables with ls) do you have v1.4 of lscolor? have you tried an [!Alert "$3dLight$" "3dLight"] bang command to make sure that the variable is valid?