Color Matching
Color matching is a subject we take quite seriously - we see the disappointment people have when the set they receive doesn't match the renders they fell in love with. You'll hear a lot of discussion around how every monitor is different, lighting effects how we perceive colors, emissive light from a monitor is different from reflected light from real life materials, and this is all true - but let's talk a bit about what we're doing to make sure we get this as close as we can.
To start with, colors were matched utilizing a monitor calibrated at 99.67% sRGB gamut coverage ΔE (delta E) average of .05 and ΔE max of 0.4 (Delta E is the difference between the measured color value vs. the reference value. Less than 1.0 is considered to be imperceptible to the human eye)
These were matched to physical samples under a D65 calibrated high CRI 95 (Ra) and R9 > 80 color matching light. (CRI is the Color Rendering Index, and measures how good a light is at rendering color correctly. R9 is specifically the Red index, and is significantly tougher to achieve - very few lights list this rating, and anything above 50 would be considered good, and the 80+ range is getting into Excellent.
However, these ultimately are still an imperfect attempt to get digital to match the physical. We can't solve this, but we can provide you additional examples - to that end we have taken white-balanced photos in a light booth with high CRI 6500K lights, with both lens and camera body color correction calibrations performed. These are pictured below. Please note, even with these corrections in place, what you see on your monitor is unlikely to be a perfect match to what you would see if you had a RAL K7 or K1 book in hand.
When we receive color samples from the manufacturer, they will be measured using a spectrophotometer with 0.05 ∆E00 measurement-to-measurement repeatability against the RAL colors we have chosen to ensure they are close matches.
For the watercolor novelties, we will not be able to repeat this full process. However, this same attention to detail that leads us to believe all of this is necessary is going to be laser-focused on making sure they meet our and your expectations.
Cliff Notes: There are a lot of things that make color matching renders to what will ultimately end up in your hands impossible to achieve perfectly. We've done everything we can so far by using calibrated equipment and attempting to match to physical samples, and have the photos above as another attempt to try to accurately represent the colors as best we can, and will be putting a high bar on our color samples matching the physical color standards we are using, and will be checking using a spectrophotometer to do so. If you want the best representation of what the colors will be, if you have a RAL K7 or K1 book, you can use it to see the same standards we are matching to.
