Some colours stick in your mind more than others. Like perfect orange. But as anyone in print, packaging, textiles or design knows, colour isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of precise fact.
That precision is more important than ever. Whether you’re matching a client’s brand colours or checking samples from overseas, knowing your colour exactly – down to the decimal point – is the difference between a perfect match and a costly mistake. But you know this already.
Thing is though, how do you tell, how different two colours are in an instant? Well, we’re all about the colour here, no BS. When we found this simple but useful tool, we thought it was worth sharing: ColorTell’s ΔE calculator. (And for those of you who didn’t know, right-click on the background of your browser and it’ll translate the standard Chinese into English, or something like it. We are genuinely full of helpful stuff like this.)
No skin in the game on our part, and obviously, other website tools are available and some of them are probably written in English, but we think that one’s handy to know. It’ll let you compare two colours using the four most common Delta E methods:
🔶ΔE76 🔶 ΔE94 🔶 ΔE CMC 🔶 ΔE2000
Teaching our grandmother’s to suck oranges perhaps, but ΔE is ALL about defining colour difference. And if you work with colour every day, then small differences matter. That tool relies on maths, not guesswork.
(Those caveats again, it’s a helpful guide, not a magic bullet. Please don’t blame us if you type in 62.3, 12.8, 54.57 and twelve 40-ft shipping containers turn up. Thanks.)
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