The best way to visualize how color will react in real world lighting conditions is to use a light booth. Traditional light booths contain common illuminants like daylight, incandescent, and fluorescent to replicate how color will look in the retail store and post-purchase in outdoor and home lighting. Today, the increased use of LED lamps in home, commercial, and retail environments is impacting decades of standardized lighting procedures. How LED is Changing the Game LED lights hav...
Posted August 09, 2019 by X-Rite Color
With so many requests for innovative bases, transparency, and special effects, formulating color for paint, coating, and plastic applications can be a challenge. To keep up, formulation software needs to be innovative, too. We recently launched version 10 of our Color iMatch formulation software, and it is our smartest version yet. It allows you to select cost-reducing parameters, such as lowest cost or fewest colorants, and will determine the best formula for your application. It work...
Posted July 10, 2019 by Rich Knapp
Are you wasting too much time and money on incorrect color? Even if you use the best color measurement tools available, your color will still fail without quality control. Quality control (QC) means verifying the color you specify is the same color you manufacture, throughout production. Setting up a QC program can help you accurately communicate color with clients and suppliers, inspect raw materials before you begin working, and verify your color is correct before you ship. ...
Posted June 27, 2019 by Tim Mouw
As we move through spring and into summer, we’re revisiting Pantone Color Institute’s Spring/Summer 2019 Fashion Color Trend Report. This season’s report features the top 12 stand out colors as well as current takes on four classic neutrals. Images extracted with permission from PANTONEVIEW Colour Planner Spring/Summer 2019. According to Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, “This new mindset underscores a...
Posted June 10, 2019 by X-Rite Color
The environmental footprint of fashion is out of control. According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), “Textile mills generate one-fifth of the world's industrial water pollution and use 20,000 chemicals, many of them carcinogenic, to make clothes.” Fabric being dyed in factory. Image from NRDC.org. A Problem That Impacts Everyone Did you know it takes about 200 tons of water (enough to fill several swimming pools) to produce one ton of cott...
Posted May 29, 2019 by X-Rite Color
Your customer rejected your latest shipment due to color. You checked the color before you sent it and it passed tolerance… You did everything the same way last time and it passed tolerance… So why did it get rejected now? We get this question from our customers all the time. The Dreaded “Error Stack” Color rejections create waste and increase production costs. Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables that contribute to the color you produce,...
Posted March 07, 2019 by Tim Mouw
If you only measure color on opaque substrates and painted parts, the Ci7500 benchtop spectrophotometer might be a good choice for you. The newest member of our Ci7x family, this unit is a mid-range benchtop spectrophotometer that only measures in reflectance mode. Today we’ll explain the difference between transmission and reflectance measurements so you can determine if the new Ci7500 can meet your color measurement needs, or if you need a device that can also measure...
Posted February 26, 2019 by Mike Huda
For the last few Decembers, we’ve provided you with a list of “top color measurement blogs” for that respective year. As we reviewed this year’s list, we noticed that your favorite/ the most-read blogs could be categorized into a few buckets. So, without further ado, here’s 2018’s top blog topics! 2018’s Most Popular Color Measurement Topic: Tolerancing Not to our team’s surprise, Tolerancing – what it is/what it means for your busines...
Posted December 20, 2018 by X-Rite Color
Each year, Pantone announces its highly anticipated “Color of the Year”. The selection is intended to serve as a strategic direction for design and color-conscious industries as well as a conversation piece around our culture, where it is going and what we collectively need…and it certainly gets everyone talking about color! Color is no longer just something we see and appreciate - it enhances and influences the way we experience life. Color, as a strategic element of d...
Posted December 06, 2018 by Tim Mouw
Like geographic coordinates – longitude, latitude, and altitude – L*a*b* color values give us a way to locate and communicate colors. What’s the history of L*a*b*? In the 1940’s, Richard Hunter introduced a tri-stimulus model, Lab, which is scaled to achieve near uniform spacing of perceived color differences. While Hunter’s Lab was adopted as the de facto model for plotting absolute color coordinates and differences between colors, it was never formally accepted as...
Posted October 08, 2018 by Tim Mouw