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Before someone tastes candy, they see its color and make assumptions about its flavor, freshness, and quality. Color matters in sweets because they come in vibrant hues, and consumers tend to reach for the product that most matches their ideal of a desirable color. Color can also indicate issues in product development or processing steps, making it an effective indicator of quality control. Additionally, measuring color enables consistency across batches. All underscore the importance of knowing how to quantify it accurately.

1. Size and Shape

Size, shape, and texture vary among candies and can create a measurement challenge. Advanced color and spectral data measurement tools account for these variances. Calibration allows for more accurate color measurement across differences while reducing errors. 

2. Color Variations

One piece of candy may contain multiple colors, and some sweets have a different surface color than the interior. A color measurement device must be able to quantify these spectral variations across the color of every layer and swirl.

This chart illustrates how metameric colors appear the same under certain illuminants and drastically different under others. Image Source: Flickr user Johannes Ahlmann

Color matching is a basic but critical component of product manufacturing across industries, and manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure color consistency throughout their production process. Sometimes, this is fairly straightforward, particularly if a product is being manufactured using a single material and pigmentation source. However, when the color of multiple, different product types must be visually identical or a product is being assembled using a variety of materials undergoing unique manufacturing processes, color matching becomes more challenging. One of the primary obstructions to accurate color matching in these situations is illuminant metamerism, which must be identified through the sophisticated analytical capabilities of spectrophotometers.

Biomedical optics offer non-invasive alternatives to many healthcare procedures through the use of spectrophotometric technology. Image Source: Flickr user frankieleon

Biomedical optics very well may be the future of our health care industry. Whether you are an athlete, patient, or parent of an infant, biomedical optics will most likely play a significant role in your health care or that of someone you love in the near future. Biomedical optics utilize NIR (near-infrared) spectroscopy in a number of ways and provides a safe, non-invasive, and non-destructive method of analysis for a variety of medical needs.

Nearly every industry around the world uses measurement in one form or another. From quantity to quality, measurements must be consistent and accurate to promote productivity and profit. However, when dealing with a limited supply of materials, the use of micro measurement is where the real challenges begin. Whether you are trying to eliminate wasted product, are dealing with rare or valuable materials, or simply do not have excess materials on hand, accurate micro measurement is essential when needing to quantify data using only minimal sample amounts.

Spectrophotometry is the most advanced form of measurement for small-to-micro samples. Image Source: Flickr user Surian Soosay

Spectrophotometers measure wavelengths of light emitted from samples to ensure product consistency, desired color output, and other industry-relevant factors. 

What Is Reflectance?

Reflectance can be defined as the ratio of reflected to incident radiation, and it's an essential measurement in several fields. It corresponds to the amount of light that your sample reflects (emits) as compared to a specific reference material. Reflectance color measurement is required samples that are opaque as apposed to translucent or transparent. 

The percentage you get when measuring reflectance is a spectrum of reflection percentage per wavelength or nanometer (nm). For example, if you test a red sample with white light, the expected spectrum should hit the maximum reflectance, usually around 700 nanometers for red visible spectra. 

How to Measure Reflectance

A spectrophotometer attains a measurement of reflectivity by fulfilling the following actions: 

1. The spectrophotometer transmits all the wavelengths of light while shining a light on the sample. 
2. It measures the light that the sample reflects back. 
3. It converts that measurement into a quantified graph showing the dominant wavelengths of the color reflectance. 

The reflectance consists of diffuse reflected light and specular reflected light. 

Diffuse reflected light is the permeating light that scatters in a variety of directions, observed when light beams reflect from microscopically rough surfaces.

Specular reflected light reflects at the same angle as the incident angle of light, creating a mirror image. Essentially, this beam of light when reflecting off of smooth surfaces remains as a beam of light. 

The Purpose of Measuring Reflectance

Reflectance measurement shows which part of the light spectrum a particular object belongs to. Humans have evolved to see a small part of the spectrum, known as visible light. The range of visible light stops at around 700 nanometers, but most of the light spectrum falls outside that continuum. 

Measuring reflectance ensures that an item meets the aesthetic and quality control requirements of various items. It shows the dominant wavelengths that allow you to check that the product meets the desired wavelength range. Here are the typical wavelength ranges of different colors: 

• Yellow: 570-585 nm
• Blue: 440-490 nm
• Indigo: 420-440 nm
• Red: 620-780 nm
• Orange: 585-620 nm
• Green: 490-570 nm
• Violet: 400-420 nm

Research shows that color is one of the most significant variables affecting customers' choice of virtually all consumer goods, from the foods we eat to the clothes we wear to the medications we take. Colors are vital to guiding consumer choices — selecting the correct hues can be crucial to a product's success.

As such, understanding how color theory works is essential to your ability to harness the potential of colorfully. You can attract customers, enhance their experiences, and shape customer relationships with your product with appealing color harmonies.

What Is Color Harmony?

Color harmony is a set of rules for producing visually appealing color combinations. These ideas frequently use the color wheel, a circular depiction of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors ordered in rainbow order. 

You can find color harmony by placing geometric shapes on the wheel. Choose your key color — the color in your design you cannot change or want to draw attention to — and locate the color harmony types on the color wheel to identify the combinations most pleasing to the eye.

Once you have found harmonious colors, you can adjust their saturation, tone, tint, and shade. These factors make colors brighter, darker, or lighter, letting you achieve more hues beyond the standard 12 on the color wheel. Changing these aspects of your colors can give your color scheme the right look or mood for your project.

How Understanding Color Harmony Can Help Enhance Consumer Perception and Experience

Color is very significant in product marketing. It is an effective marketing tactic that impacts customer purchases in various ways. Marketers must explore color harmony to promote items successfully. Almost every product sold nowadays has a colorful façade. Choosing the proper colors can have a significant influence on product sales. While no one set of rules governs color choices, research has created broad recommendations based on associative learning, which describes the link between color and emotion.

Color goes beyond visual appeal — it can affect a person's perceptions and behaviors. Color psychology studies how colors impact human behavior, especially for branding. Your color choices will impact your customers' impression of your brand, including whether they purchase from you. Marketers employ color associations to enhance product sales by conveying a message to the customer. Colors enhance consumer perception and experience through:

Package Designs

Package designs and colors help customers decide if they want to purchase the product. For example, most toothpaste and whitening strip packets are blue. Blue is linked with cleanliness, reinforcing the product's promise of white teeth. White symbolizes purity, making it a perfect accent color. Black is frequently the color of choice for electronics and other luxury effects. These things are costly, and the dark hue helps to promote them as rare, high-quality items.

Brand Recognition

Colors help you stand out from competitors or differentiate between product types. Your colors speak to your brand's personality, so choose colors that speak to the brand image you want to portray. Use the same colors across all your branded materials to make your brand recognizable. Successful color manipulation allows buyers to quickly and effortlessly recognize the desired brand among a sea of identical items.

Customer Associations

Every color is associated with a mood or concept. Make use of these connections to tie your items to a specific emotion. While certain color associations appear deeply ingrained, the consumer's personality, age, gender, and cultural background all have a significant role — various colors appeal to different personality types of buyers. 

Fast food restaurants and clearance sales employ stimulating hues such as red, orange, and black to create a sense of urgency in impulsive purchasers. Lighter shades of pink and sky blue are used in retail clothes stores to create a quiet, pleasant environment for traditional consumers who want to browse things at their leisure.

Examples of Color Harmony

Colorimeters are straightforward color comparison tools that are often confused with spectrophotometers. However, colorimeters have a more limited range of capabilities than spectrophotometers. What exactly is a colorimeter, and how does it work?

What Is a Colorimeter?

A colorimeter is a device that measures and quantifies emitted light from a sample. It is used primarily to identify color differences between a production sample and a known color standard. The primary elements of a colorimeter include:

• Illuminant: A controlled light source used to illuminate the sample being measured.
• Tri-stimulus absorption filters: Red, green and blue (RGB) filters which quantify the emitted sample light in the form of tri-stimulus values, which replicate the human visual response to color.
• Display: Presents the data in the form of industry standard color scales and color differences.

Colorimeters may be tiny and portable for usage on the road or bigger for benchtop use in a lab.

How Does a Colorimeter Work?

The colorimeter illuminates the sample being measured using a controlled light source. The light not absorbed by the sample is ‘emitted’. This light is what we see as the color of the sample. This emitted light is compared to an established standard for pass/fail determination.

The colorimeter's lens and tristimulus absorption filter converts the light beam into an isolated wavelength. The photocell measures how much of the wavelength was absorbed and displays the data on its digital display. Colorimeters and spectrophotometers are among the most advanced color-measuring tools. Although closely linked, they each have distinct qualities that make them best suited to specific measurements.

A tristimulus colorimeter is an essential tool for objective color measurement. It consists of three fundamental components:

• Light source: The initial lighting is provided by a steady light source, usually a bulb with a consistent voltage.
• Filter system: The filter system consists of a collection of three filters. Each filter transmits a specific wavelength, allowing for selective study of the reflected light from the sample.
• Photoelectric detector: This detector transforms the intensity of emitted light into an electrical signal. The electrical output matches the sample's color attributes. 

Ideally, the combined response of the light source, filters, and detector should closely resemble the spectrum sensitivity of the human eye to a certain illuminant. Getting a perfect match between the instrument response and human eyesight is difficult. However, high-quality tristimulus colorimeters provide an accurate approximation. Notably, the mismatch occurs often in the short-wavelength band. Mathematically modifying the measured blue value (Z) in proportion to the green value (Y) creates a more accurate total value.

Because the instrument's response might vary over time, it is critical to calibrate it regularly according to manufacturer’s recommendations. Modern colorimeters generate digital outputs that may be automatically translated into industry standard color values such as CIELAB (L*,a*,b*) or CIELCH (L*C*h*) systems. 

What Are Colorimeters Used For?