COLOUR MATCHING: A Deep Dive into the Science of Colour and the increasing requirement for the use of Spectral Data for Digital Printing

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2 Nov

“The challenge of digital is that colour matching for digital textile production often does not fully meet the expectations of brands”. Lou Prestia

Major textile brands in all segments of the market require textiles to be manufactured with conformance to a colour tolerance. Read on to learn more…

Challenge: Colour Matching for Digital Textile Manufacturing

This article by Lou Prestia, USA - explores one of the challenges to applying digital textile production in place of conventional dye-based textile manufacturing. The promise of digital is the possibility of reshoring or nearshoring the production of textile materials for clothing, home décor, and industrial applications.

Today many textile products are produced overseas since conventional textile mills are often located in geographies with low costs for labour and real estate to support the economy of scale required for mass production of textile products.

The challenge of digital is that colour matching for digital textile production often does not fully meet the expectations of brands.

Major textile brands in all segments of the market require textiles to be manufactured with conformance to a colour tolerance. This is a tolerance for each colour in the finished product - matching the colour to the specified shade for the design or colourway, typically as QTX spectral data. The colours may be standard colours from colour libraries such as Pantone, CSI, Archroma, or Coloro or they may be engineered custom colours which are preferred by many brands for better product differentiation.

Colour matching tolerances for brands typically range from less than 0.50 to 1.50 Delta E (aka “∆E” or “DE”) 2000 or CMC 2:1.

The two modern metrics for colour toleranceing are ∆E2000 and ∆E CMC 2:1. ∆E 2000 (often written as DE00) is a refined colour tolerancing formula released in 2000 based on CIELAB coordinate proximity but with weighting added in different sectors of the colour gamut - so that colour differences to which human observers are most sensitive - are weighted more heavily in the tolerance calculation. DE00 has wide application in textiles and print for checking colour precision.

DE CMC 2:1 (intended for textiles as it was developed by the Colour Measurement Committee of the Society of Dyes and Colourists of Great Britain) is also commonly used in the textile industry. ∆E CMC is based on CIELCH device-independent colourspace, and “2:1” weights the chroma difference between colours more heavily (2x) that the difference in the tone (lightness, or “L”) of the colours - since the human eye is more sensitive changes in colour than to changes in tone.

Example applications of these two common colour comparison metrics are:

Pantone uses ∆E00 to tolerance textile swatches with the requirement that physical textile swatches they supply are within 0.50 DE00 of the digital master for colours without optical brighteners and 1.00 DE00 for colours dyed with optical brighteners under D65 illumination.
Colour Solutions International (CSI) tolerances the physical swatches they produce using a ∆E CMC 2:1 metric with a tolerance of 0.50 DE CMC 2:1 for all colours under multiple specific illuminants based on customer preferences. CSI ColorWall swatches comply with the < 0.50 DE CMC 2:1 metric under four illuminants (D65, F02, A10, and UL3000).
Coloro uses < 0.4 CMC 2:1 DE D65.
Archroma also uses these four illuminants but did not respond to a request to identify which DE metric is used.

One challenge in transitioning textile manufacturing to digital lies in the fact that colour managed digital reprographic systems used only match colours in one specific illuminant (usually D50 for print, D65 for textile) – but not in multiple illuminants as brands require for textile products.

A good example of this is a brand that supplies athletic uniforms will require colours to match in daylight, under industrial arena lights, and in standard home lighting so that the colours will match for outside matches, indoor matches, and in the locker room for press interviews.

Traditional colour management is historically based on matching colours in just one illuminant, but textile workflows historically have used spectral colour definitions.

Spectral measuring devices report the energy that a colour sample has when light of all colours is reflected off the sample (or in some cases transmitted through a translucent sample). The result is a measurement of the Spectral Power Distribution (SPD) of the colour – how much energy it has across the visual spectrum wavelengths from 480 – 740 nanometers.

To get the many values from the SPD into a colour managed workflow, spectral colour data is converted to a three-component CIE colourspace and used for the colour management processing. But the conversion formula from spectral to CIE space conversion requires that the illuminant for the CIE conversion be defined.

Therefore even a perfectly executed colour mapping to an output device will only match the original colour in that illuminant.

This means that if a brand specifies multi-illuminant matching, generally they cannot get this today from a digital textile system.

They can get it for all textile components produced conventionally since the fabric can be vat dyed or imaged with a rotary screen press which in both cases use custom mixed dyes formulated to deliver in-tolerance colour matching for the multiple light sources required by the brand. In certain cases, dyes can even be formulated to give a spectral match which means the colours on the product will match the design specification in any lighting since the SPD of the manufactured colour matches that of the colour in the design specification.

How can this problem be solved?

Today there are three general solutions that can be applied to deliver multi-illuminant matching:

1. ICC-based colour management with multiple CIE data sets derived from a spectral charaterization of the digital printing process. This takes more time since every possibility to match each colour in tolerance needs to be derived from a characterization (profiles) for each illuminant and the formula for the digital device must be selected based on the lowest possible DE00 or DE CMC 2:1 for each colour in all the required illuminants.

2. Spectral colour management. While this is defined in the current ICCMax specification, most colour systems vendors are not building spectral ICCMax profiles today and Digital Front Ends (DFE’s) or RIPs used in textile production have not integrated spectral Colour Matching Modules (CMMs) which would be required to utilize spectral profiles.

3. Treat the inkjet colorants like dyestuffs. New solutions on the market such as Stealth Colour seek to solve this problem not by creating an ICC profile for the textile print engine but instead measuring the base colourants across the tonal spectrum so that a spectral model of the base colour “assortment” offered by the device can be defined then used with a formula for colourant mixing to find a spectral match using the primary inkjet colourants or at least a formula that will give the required precision in multiple specified illuminants.

Lou Prestia: LinkedIn

About

I help platforms grow—through better product strategy, clearer customer narratives, and the right go-to-market execution.
My experience spans product management, technical sales support, and GTM strategy across SaaS, colour tech, and creative platforms. I’ve helped launch and scale cloud-native ecosystems, delivered modular pricing strategies that enabled $10M+ in ARR growth, and evangelized platform value to customers, executives, and field teams globally.

Today, I’m looking to contribute to a sales, technical sales, GTM enablement, or hybrid product leadership role where platform value and customer understanding meet. Let’s build something useful—together.

Thank you for your time reading. I welcome comments, corrections, and questions in the comments. If you’d like to read more articles on digital textile manufacturing or colour matching please let me know so that I can publish more articles like this one. Lou Prestia: LinkedIn