What colors work well together, and how do you choose the right combinations to match different hues? You may be surprised to learn that there is actually a science behind color matching and which colors work best together. Knowing how to match colors can aid with a variety of industrial and design applications. Explore our color matching guide to learn more.

Color Matching and Color Theory

Color theory provides an organizational structure for mixing and matching colors accurately. Essentially, color theory is a set of guidelines that use accumulated observations of human perception and psychology to identify color combinations that evoke different observer responses.

When you use color matching, you’re able to combine hues that create a pleasing aesthetic for viewers. Some critical elements for effective matching include an eye-catching contrast and the right vibrancy to evoke emotion. You’ll want to pay attention to how different selections across the color wheel can create the desired emotional and psychological response from your audience.

Primary Colors

The color wheel includes three primary colors foundational to other hues — red, blue and yellow. These three colors will always harmonize and are classic colors that work with many different designs. Eye-catching and bold, they create a vibrant visual effect. Two primary colors together will look bold yet sophisticated, and all three together can look cheerful and energetic.

As you manage production uniformity and optimized processes, maintaining consistent color standards for your products is critical. Wherever production is happening, you need to ensure color output for your products remains the same to keep your brand recognizable and demonstrate product quality.

If you’re looking for trusted solutions for consistent color measurement in diverse environments, consider a portable color spectrophotometer. This equipment is optimized for convenient transportation to help you handle quality control in a wide range of settings. Explore portable color spectrophotometer benefits for your operations.

Five Benefits of Making Color Measurement Devices Portable

When you invest in a color spectrophotometer you can take with you anywhere, you gain access to a wide range of benefits. Take advantage of the ways this portable equipment can simplify and streamline your color quality evaluations in demanding manufacturing and production environments.

1. Ensure Precise Color Communication

Inconsistent color is a critical failure point that can affect how consumers perceive and trust products, so ensuring accurate communication of color standards is critical across your enterprise.

A portable color measurement device can help you ensure accurate color identification and communication across your operations. Having a device available to address operational requirements anywhere can help your team ensure full quality checks for all products and stay on the same page about product color conditions.

2. Minimize Waste

Quality control spot checks may occur throughout the production process, including on the production line, during on-site testing and in storage checks. Each of these steps has the potential for waste and lost time, as workers must choose between halting production to take a sample to the lab or replicating a potential error. To resolve this risk, your facility can use a portable device to check products on the spot.

For diverse industries and biopharmaceutical applications, color measurement is critical to ensuring the safety and quality of products. Two color measurement devices that industries may use for these requirements are a spectrophotometer and a Chroma meter. While these devices have some general applications in common, their measurement methods and uses have some key differences.

Which option will work best for your needs? The answer depends on how you’ll be using the device and what results your operations require. Explore how these two devices differ and which option is best for your specific applications.

What Is a Chroma Meter?

Technically classified as a colorimeter, the Chroma meter measures how much of a concentrated wavelength is absorbed through a solution. This device is used in a wide variety of industries, including plastics, automotive interior manufacturing, exterior color control, food, chemicals, coatings and cosmetics. Known for its user-friendly interface, the Chroma meter uses CIE L*a*b* and CIE L*C*h color spaces to precisely identify colors.

A Chroma meter is:

• Specialized to compare products with predefined samples
• Able to memorize target colors
• Able to calculate color differences
• Optimized for monitoring color quality

This device offers the advantage of working quickly for rapid measurement results. It also tends to be more portable than other measurement options and is highly cost-effective. However, the Chroma meter also has a limited range of data and lacks versatility for research and product development applications.

Spatial and spectral resolution in remote sensing are both critical for specific applications. Both are advanced geospatial technologies with critical uses in geoimaging and other applications. However, spatial and spectral resolution are not the same. Learn more about how these two resolution methods work and which one is optimized for your applications.

Spatial vs. Spectral Resolution

Spatial resolution measures the number of pixels in a given area. Smaller pixels in a raster will look more detailed, while larger pixels will look more coarse. Consequently, higher spatial resolutions will provide clearer and more detailed images than lower resolutions.

Spectral resolution, on the other hand, is the ability of a sensor to identify fine wavelength intervals. It measures each band in a dataset within the electromagnetic spectrum. While some sensors will collect information within bands of uniform width, others will only take overall measurements.

Applications and Capabilities of Spatial Resolution

By measuring how detailed an object can appear in an image, spatial resolution can help identify imaging quality and accuracy. Effective spatial resolution will depend on how the displayed object interacts with the compression system.

In general, spatial resolution:

• Uses spatial combination features to create enhanced structural information
• Characterizes complex environments
• Identifies less reflective elements and registers strongly reflective elements as smaller than the image resolution

In various color measurement applications, you may notice that the apparent lightness of a sample differs based on its glossiness. For example, the color of a glossy blue object seems more vivid than a rough-textured object of the same hue. Two samples with different surface textures can be viewed as different colors.

Spectrophotometers measured the reflected light from a sample. These precision color measuring devices measure the body or diffuse reflectance and can include or exclude the specular reflection component. Determining the correct Specular Component Excluded (SCE) or Specular Component Included (SCI) modality to use in your situation is critical. The best option for you depends on your application and requirements. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the modality that works best for you.

Specular Component Included, abbreviated as SCI or SPIN, and Specular Component Excluded, abbreviated as SCE or SPEX, provide different information about the measured specimen. What is SCI versus SCE, and which option best fits your application? Read on to discover what both terms represent and how you can use them.

Spectrophotometer Setup for Liquids

Color is an essential factor for purchasing decisions and taste perception, so the color of liquids like orange juice, sports drinks, apple cider and beer will significantly affect your customers’ opinion of your product and whether they would repurchase it.

Color can be a difficult variable to control during production — natural ingredient colors can vary, causing slightly differing colors. Measuring the color of your liquid with a spectrophotometer liquid setup will allow you to get accurate and reliable results to boost your quality control.

What Is Liquid Color Measurement?

Liquid color measurement is the evaluation of the color properties of a liquid. Depending on the liquid, it will require different techniques to most accurately measure the color. Here is how to measure the color of a liquid depending on its quality:

• Opaque: Opaque liquids allow no light to pass through them. Directional 45/0° reflectance geometry is the best method for opaque liquids since it is similar to how the human eye interprets color.

Spectrophotometry vs. Spectroscopy

Spectrophotometry and spectroscopy are undoubtedly similar words — however, these terms are not interchangeable. While spectrophotometry and spectroscopy deal with related concepts, they focus on different scientific interactions and outcomes to gain varying insights.

Through this guide, you’ll learn about the difference between spectrophotometry and spectroscopy, their basic definitions and the instruments used in each science.

What Is Spectrophotometry?

Spectrophotometry operates on the principle that every chemical compound absorbs, reflects or transmits light over a specific wavelength spectrum. You can use this technique to determine the amount of light a chemical substance absorbs by measuring the intensity of the light as a beam passes through the sample.

The science of spectrophotometry allows for qualitative and quantitative analysis and is widely used across various industries, including chemistry, physics, biochemistry, biology and clinical studies.