(And why it's more Important Than Ever Today) By Shawn Mulligan of Datacolor

Scientists will describe color as the quality of an object with respect to light. But, as any one of us knows, our human response to color is very emotional. When skillfully used by designers, color creates the kind of harmonious balance and appeal that helps sell everything from personal care products to automobiles to wallcovering.

Precisely because of this blend of science and emotion, color remains difficult to manage across the entire manufacturing supply chain cycle. Much can happen to impact the color from the time a designer creates it until it is inspected on a factory floor. Multiple processes are required for successful color development throughout its long and complicated cycle. This paper covers technological advances in the most significant areas of color development - color matching and color quality control - as well as how the latest color communication system integrates these tools into an overall virtual color environment that benefits the entire supply chain quite literally from mind to market.

The way it was: a short history of managing color across industries and locations

Describing color has always been a subjective and expensive process for all parties involved in the production of color. Suppliers, particularly those separated by time zones and language barriers, experience the most difficulty.

In the 1980s, manufacturers alleviated some of these difficulties by measuring the physical standards with a spectrophotometer in one location and then distributing the "color" of that standard to other locations with the data from the spectrophotometer -i.e., in the form of spectral reflectance curves. A physical sample was still needed for visual reference, but the approval of batches was "by the numbers."

Yet challenges in communicating color remained. Regardless of how many numbers are assigned to a color, we don't see in numbers. A verbal description doesn't precisely help us visualize what another person means by "fire-engine red," as color is both a physical and psychological response to light. When a paint pigment such as titanium oxide, for example, strongly scatters light, it yields a white effect. When another pigment absorbs certain wavelengths of light, it produces a colored effect. In addition to this physical phenomenon, each viewer brings a different response to the same stimulus. These differences can be due to age, fatigue, color vision defects, gender, or experience.

Consider how human factors impact the color matching process in this typical scenario: the designer struggles to communicate precisely the color he or she has envisioned, using physical samples and describing how the proof should vary from the sample - i.e., warmer, brighter, bluer. The colorant supplier tries to match each sample, but still doesn't satisfy the design spec because the sample is only a starting point. Not only is the designer limited to feedback about the sample in the most subjective terms (e.g., by talking about it), but the sample the supplier was given to match may not be the same substrate or pigment coloration as the final product. And the medium matters. Whether it's opaque or transparent, matte or gloss finish, flat or round, plastic or paper, affects perception of the finished color as surely as does the other considerations.

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