Colour Perception and Communication

Spectrophotometers facilitate colour communication across languages and cultures.

Distinguishing colours is perhaps one of the most fundamental human activities. We use colour to organize, understand, and describe objects every day of our lives in both conscious and subconscious ways. The greyed meat warns us of spoilage. The orange pill tells us to take it in the daytime. The red leaves tell us fall has arrived. The green light tells us it’s safe to go. We wear our teams’ colour to show our allegiance, we tell visitors that our house is the white one on the left, we dress ourselves in black to demonstrate our mourning.

But while colours are often regarded as facts – red is red, right? – the way we come to name and differentiate between colours is in fact a deeply cultural process. This variability of colour identification across languages and cultures presents considerable difficulties in an increasingly globalized economy in which colour information must be communicated throughout global supply chains. As such, industries are increasingly turning to numerical colour classification systems based on instrumental colour analysis to facilitate colour communication.

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Understand how Spectrophotometers help people and entities communicate colour information around the world.

How does it all work? Let’s start here.

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