What Is Color Measurement for Textiles?

Color measurement of textiles involves grading the specific hues and shades of the materials. The measuring process evaluates the overall product quality and helps ensure a consistent appearance across production lines.

Understanding color spaces is foundational to knowing how to measure textile colors. On a digital display, various colors are represented by being assigned a color space value based on RGB or CMYK mathematical values. Textiles depend on color consistency to attract consumers, so maintaining the same color values during each production cycle is essential. With a spectrophotometer or colorimeter, you can measure these materials with advanced optical technologies that identify color spaces based on how the human eye perceives them.

Ensuring color quality and consistency is vital for fabric color production. Accurate textile color measurement can:

• Build brand integrity: Demonstrating consistent color quality standards over time can help you establish your brand's integrity.
• Attract sales: When customers trust your product quality, you'll boost sales and increase consumer engagement.
• Minimize risk: By managing consistent quality standards for textiles, you can decrease the risks and costs associated with product variation.

What Our Tools Measure

With our state-of-the-art tools, you can address management requirements for a wide range of textile color measurements. These include:

• Camouflage: To help ensure consistent color tones and contrasts, our tools can provide more accurate measurements and quality monitoring.
• Denim: With our solutions, you can help manage the color consistency of denim rope and denim fabrics to protect your brand integrity.
• Automotive textiles: Our tools can address a range of automotive textile quality controls, including measuring colors for automotive carpets, upholsteries and headliners.

Types of Textile Color Measurement Instruments

We have a selection of advanced color measurement tools that will help your business improve the quality and speed of your manufacturing process. Several of our color measurement instruments are ideal for different types of textiles, including camouflage, denim, HiVis safety apparel, and automotive textiles.

MiniScan EZ 4500

The MiniScan EZ 4500 is an excellent choice for automotive upholsteries and carpet as well as camouflage. It uses 45°/0° geometry to measure color the way the human eye sees color, and its compact design is perfect to take on the go.

The onboard software of this device includes most major industrial reflectance color scales and indices, such as Hunter L,a,b and CIE L*a*b*. It also stores up to 800 sample measurements and 100 standards and can average up to 20 sample readings.

The easy-to-read display offers user-friendly functionality. The ergonomic design and one-handed operation help keep measurements running efficiently. As our most popular handheld spectrophotometer/colorimeter, this device delivers intuitive features and accurate readings to measure on-the-go more conveniently and reliably.

UltraScan PRO

The UltraScan PRO uses diffuse d/8° geometry to measure the full spectral range in a matter of seconds. This fast, reliable performance makes it ideal for challenging applications.

UltraScan PRO measures transmitted and reflected color as well as transmission haze, spectral transmittance and spectral reflectance. It meets all ASTM, CIE and USP color measurement guidelines.

The UltraScan PRO is an excellent choice for camouflage color measurement. Specialized to meet rigorous research and quality monitoring standards, it delivers trusted precision for your color tone measurements. The device offers ultraviolet region calibration to precisely measure whitening agents, and it provides an extended wavelength range to evaluate camouflage materials.

Agera

Perfect for automotive carpet, upholsteries and headliners as well as denim fabric and rope, the Agera measures color and UV content with an extra-large sample port and includes a five-megapixel camera for capturing images and facilitating sample positioning. Able to measure gloss and color simultaneously while storing the image, this efficient solution helps you evaluate samples quickly and accurately. Full-spectrum measurement provides an ultimate solution to manage appearance consistency and quality.

The 0°/45°c circumferential geometry provides precise and consistent color results. Embedded with EasyMatch Essentials Quality Control software, Agera includes essential color scales and indices such as CIE L*a*b*, CIE LCh and Hunter L,a,b. Innovative data management features help ensure you can evaluate and track measurements, empowering you to improve production efficiency and accuracy continuously. A modern, industrial touch screen offers an accessible interface for fast, easy operation.

SpectraTrend HT

Our SpectraTrend HT instrument provides highly accurate, non-contact color and shade measurements. It also supplies continuous color data, which makes it an ideal choice to use during production runs in order to identify and correct color variations as soon as possible. This ability to make changes in real-time reduces waste and its associated costs. It also makes it much less likely that you'll ship products made from defective dye lots to customers.

The SpectraTrend HT includes software that features Hunter L,a,b, CIE LCh, Shade Number and other standard color scales and indices. Its customizable, real-time data delivers critical visibility into production and quality control, and you can seamlessly integrate it into plant control networks if required. Whether you need to measure individual products or bulk materials, this system can provide precise data for quality evaluation. It offers versatility to match your specific applications and industrial standards.

Contact HunterLab for Your Textile Color Measurement Tools

HunterLab has been a trusted color quality leader for more than 70 years. We have the advanced technologies and capabilities to deliver solutions for virtually any color challenge. With the broadest range of color measurement solutions in the industry, we're sure to have the perfect instrument for your needs. We deliver state-of-the-art tools to help you maintain quality standards for your enterprise. Whatever your requirements, we'll partner with you to provide trusted solutions that help you protect your brand and boost consumer engagement.

Our extensive offerings include solutions for textile, painting and coating, plastics, chemicals and beverages color measurement. Our equipment can help your products meet industry-specific standards and comply with regulations. These tools can also help you manage brand integrity and provide the best quality output for consumers.

For more information about these instruments or any of our other tools, contact us today and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

We've worked with thousands of companies, but you'll feel like our one and only.

Connect

If color accuracy is crucial to your business, you’ve come to the right place—with the right people. Let’s get in touch.