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Funny - I had a conversation with a friend about this exact topic the other day. Painting a few (old) walls in my apartment. I asked the original designer wha

by nlh 11y ago

Funny - I had a conversation with a friend about this exact topic the other day. Painting a few (old) walls in my apartment. I asked the original designer what color they were, and she confidently replied "Swiss Coffee". Great! So I got to Lowes only to find out....there are about 35 different variations on Swiss Coffee. We seem to have solved the color issue when it comes to programming - hex codes are (relatively) easy. Why are we still choosing our home paints based on horribly arbitrary names like "Shadow Mist" and "Lily Pond" ... ? (And yes, I know the actual answer - branding! Why would you buy Brand A over Brand B if all the colors get commoditized into hex codes....the answer is...you wouldn't. So? Fancy names for everyone!)

zyxley 11y ago
Pantone uses coded colors (e.g. things like "#106U Bright Yellow"), with each having RGB and CMYK values, physical ink-mixing proportions for custom printing, paint standards, etc. From what I understand it's pretty popular with corporate marketing because it takes the hassle out of getting extremely consistent colors across different physical and digital media.
542458 11y ago
It has been more or less solved - it's called the Pantone Color system. That said, it doesn't really work the way you'd expect. It'll get you close (say, if you need a consistent color for your brand), but a pantone color on it's own isn't enough to define a material. The issue with defining physical colour codes is that it gets really complicated when you consider finish. With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have. With paints and plastics the finish (how glossy the surface is, how metallic it is, coated or uncoated, inclusions like metal flake, etc) really messes things up. This tends to "break" systems like Pantone, and means that it's really hard to choose a few variables to absolutely define a color.
- smackfu 11y ago
  Even Pantone at the basic level has coated and uncoated.
- illicium 11y ago
  > With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have Screens have a huge number of "finishes" because calibration varies wildly between devices. It's gotten better over the years but still few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB.
  - itp 11y ago
    That's true, but I think the point is that a single screen only has one "finish" (at any given point in time?).
  - 542458 11y ago
    You're right. I should have said "With screen color, you have only one choice of finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have".
  - jacobolus 11y ago
    > few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB. All currently selling Apple computers (at least phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, I’m not sure about the watches) are extremely close to sRGB. So that’s a considerable proportion of computer/mobile device users. Other vendors’ devices have a much spottier record, but matching sRGB is by no means an impossible goal. More generally, screens can be precisely characterized (either at the factory or by end users) and color management software can pipe pixel colors through a lookup table on their way to the display, so that at least in-gamut colors appear correctly. Sadly Windows and Linux didn’t support proper color management at an OS level for many years, so lots of software on those platforms still doesn’t do it correctly. And web browsers on all platforms punt on correctly doing color management for CSS colors, with the excuse of matching non-color-managed Flash. Even more unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android has any color management whatsoever. iOS gets around this by making sure all the displays have nearly identical color (at least on recent machines), but on Android getting accurate color is a crapshoot. Then there are televisions, for most of which color is a complete joke.
ssharp 11y ago
I've never shopped paint brands based on color. I always just assume the brand will have the color I want in their collection of swatches. I have bought different brands based on perceived/researched quality. I've found personal/anecdotal differences in how well paint coats, how runny it is, how well it holds up, using different brands.
- zyxley 11y ago
  > I always just assume the brand will have the color I want in their collection of swatches. The problem comes when you need to do a patch job on the drywall for whatever reason (lost cat in the walls, wiring problem, whatever), and when it comes time to repaint not being able to match the exact color gets you a square that's a slightly different color than the rest of the wall.
masklinn 11y ago
> (And yes, I know the actual answer - branding! Why would you buy Brand A over Brand B if all the colors get commoditized into hex codes....the answer is...you wouldn't. So? Fancy names for everyone!) There's no denying physical paint brings additional complexities. The paint's exact recipe will change the interactions with the surface, the thickness of the layers and how the paint ages, all of which (and the painted surface itself) influence the final color and how it evolves. And then each color can come in a variety of finishes.
lotyrin 11y ago
I don't think it's a conspiracy to create paint brand loyalty, it's just too hard to codify real life color except as mix ratios of the formulations for pigments and paint that differ from brand to brand. You could define a standard measuring device and a standard light source and white and black balance but then you'll have two paints that measure #F00 but aren't guaranteed to at all look the same color to the human eye in varying natural light conditions. If you got really sophisticated and defined color as a graph of wavelength to albedo then you'd probably just end up where we already are of "Cherry (brand A)" and "Cherry (brand B)" because it's post-facto and not prescriptive (and still wouldn't account for specular vs diffuse reflection).
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  You couldn't even name a paint by a short number (like a hex code) if you wanted to. That only works because we get to think of colors in terms of three channels, a mix of red/green/blue. Cherry (brand a) and Cherry (brand b) paint could look identical under daylight but totally different under incandescent. To define an actual reflective color of an object, you need a spectral reflectance distribution. This measures what percent of light is reflected at any given wavelength. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/imgvis/spdcur.gif http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/imgvis/spd... Then the actual color you see depends on the spectral power distribution of the light source. For every wavelength, you multiply the amount of light of that wavelength by the percent of light reflected at that wavelength, and you end up with a new spectral power distribution for light coming off the object. That goes into your eye, hits the retina, activates three types of cones in some proportion, and your brain turns it into a perceived color. Incidentally, the image linked above includes a tomato. “#FF6347” doesn't cut it. More info (and image source) here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/spd.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/spd.html Pantone works because it's a lookup table that maps short names to a set of predefined reflectance distributions. In the real world, that's as close to hex colors as we can get.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    For a bit more detail in that step at the retina, here are the relative responses of the different cones to various wavelengths (normalized to max = 1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy#/media/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy#/media/File:Cones_... Once you account for how much light comes off the object at each wavelength, these curves determine how strongly they impact your color perception. S/M/L stand for short, medium, and long, and are the names we give to the different cone types based on the relative length of waves that stimulate them. As you can see, we don't have a very balanced view of the "visible spectrum." Butter, for example, is about 1.5x as reflective at 400nm as 450nm. But your eyes are something like 20x as sensitive to the light at 450nm (near peak sensitivity of short wavelength cones), so that light has a bigger impact on activating the short cones. 450nm is also picked up by medium and long cones, while 400 is pretty much below their range.
yoodenvranx 11y ago
The big problem is that the color on the wall changes over the years. If you have to fix a scratch in a colored wall after 3 years you might as well just paint it new.
RobertKerans 11y ago
Our team at work had a very long-running argument last year with the general manager in charge of our main income-generating operation who wanted to base the search on the our main product site on product codes. Those product codes are fairly logical in the way they are structured, and are clearly very specific, and he just did not get why people looking for items might not find them far more useful than, say, names of things

by nlh 11y ago

zyxley 11y ago

Pantone uses coded colors (e.g. things like "#106U Bright Yellow"), with each having RGB and CMYK values, physical ink-mixing proportions for custom printing, paint standards, etc. From what I understand it's pretty popular with corporate marketing because it takes the hassle out of getting extremely consistent colors across different physical and digital media.

542458 11y ago

It has been more or less solved - it's called the Pantone Color system. That said, it doesn't really work the way you'd expect. It'll get you close (say, if you need a consistent color for your brand), but a pantone color on it's own isn't enough to define a material. The issue with defining physical colour codes is that it gets really complicated when you consider finish. With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have. With paints and plastics the finish (how glossy the surface is, how metallic it is, coated or uncoated, inclusions like metal flake, etc) really messes things up. This tends to "break" systems like Pantone, and means that it's really hard to choose a few variables to absolutely define a color.

smackfu 11y ago
Even Pantone at the basic level has coated and uncoated.
illicium 11y ago
> With screen color, you have only one finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have Screens have a huge number of "finishes" because calibration varies wildly between devices. It's gotten better over the years but still few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB.
- itp 11y ago
  That's true, but I think the point is that a single screen only has one "finish" (at any given point in time?).
- 542458 11y ago
  You're right. I should have said "With screen color, you have only one choice of finish, and that's whatever the user's monitor happens to have".
- jacobolus 11y ago
  > few users have screens that accurately reproduce 100% of sRGB. All currently selling Apple computers (at least phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, I’m not sure about the watches) are extremely close to sRGB. So that’s a considerable proportion of computer/mobile device users. Other vendors’ devices have a much spottier record, but matching sRGB is by no means an impossible goal. More generally, screens can be precisely characterized (either at the factory or by end users) and color management software can pipe pixel colors through a lookup table on their way to the display, so that at least in-gamut colors appear correctly. Sadly Windows and Linux didn’t support proper color management at an OS level for many years, so lots of software on those platforms still doesn’t do it correctly. And web browsers on all platforms punt on correctly doing color management for CSS colors, with the excuse of matching non-color-managed Flash. Even more unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android has any color management whatsoever. iOS gets around this by making sure all the displays have nearly identical color (at least on recent machines), but on Android getting accurate color is a crapshoot. Then there are televisions, for most of which color is a complete joke.

ssharp 11y ago

I've never shopped paint brands based on color. I always just assume the brand will have the color I want in their collection of swatches. I have bought different brands based on perceived/researched quality. I've found personal/anecdotal differences in how well paint coats, how runny it is, how well it holds up, using different brands.

zyxley 11y ago
> I always just assume the brand will have the color I want in their collection of swatches. The problem comes when you need to do a patch job on the drywall for whatever reason (lost cat in the walls, wiring problem, whatever), and when it comes time to repaint not being able to match the exact color gets you a square that's a slightly different color than the rest of the wall.

masklinn 11y ago

> (And yes, I know the actual answer - branding! Why would you buy Brand A over Brand B if all the colors get commoditized into hex codes....the answer is...you wouldn't. So? Fancy names for everyone!) There's no denying physical paint brings additional complexities. The paint's exact recipe will change the interactions with the surface, the thickness of the layers and how the paint ages, all of which (and the painted surface itself) influence the final color and how it evolves. And then each color can come in a variety of finishes.

lotyrin 11y ago

I don't think it's a conspiracy to create paint brand loyalty, it's just too hard to codify real life color except as mix ratios of the formulations for pigments and paint that differ from brand to brand. You could define a standard measuring device and a standard light source and white and black balance but then you'll have two paints that measure #F00 but aren't guaranteed to at all look the same color to the human eye in varying natural light conditions. If you got really sophisticated and defined color as a graph of wavelength to albedo then you'd probably just end up where we already are of "Cherry (brand A)" and "Cherry (brand B)" because it's post-facto and not prescriptive (and still wouldn't account for specular vs diffuse reflection).

wlesieutre 11y ago
You couldn't even name a paint by a short number (like a hex code) if you wanted to. That only works because we get to think of colors in terms of three channels, a mix of red/green/blue. Cherry (brand a) and Cherry (brand b) paint could look identical under daylight but totally different under incandescent. To define an actual reflective color of an object, you need a spectral reflectance distribution. This measures what percent of light is reflected at any given wavelength. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/imgvis/spdcur.gif http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/imgvis/spd... Then the actual color you see depends on the spectral power distribution of the light source. For every wavelength, you multiply the amount of light of that wavelength by the percent of light reflected at that wavelength, and you end up with a new spectral power distribution for light coming off the object. That goes into your eye, hits the retina, activates three types of cones in some proportion, and your brain turns it into a perceived color. Incidentally, the image linked above includes a tomato. “#FF6347” doesn't cut it. More info (and image source) here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/spd.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/spd.html Pantone works because it's a lookup table that maps short names to a set of predefined reflectance distributions. In the real world, that's as close to hex colors as we can get.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  For a bit more detail in that step at the retina, here are the relative responses of the different cones to various wavelengths (normalized to max = 1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy#/media/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy#/media/File:Cones_... Once you account for how much light comes off the object at each wavelength, these curves determine how strongly they impact your color perception. S/M/L stand for short, medium, and long, and are the names we give to the different cone types based on the relative length of waves that stimulate them. As you can see, we don't have a very balanced view of the "visible spectrum." Butter, for example, is about 1.5x as reflective at 400nm as 450nm. But your eyes are something like 20x as sensitive to the light at 450nm (near peak sensitivity of short wavelength cones), so that light has a bigger impact on activating the short cones. 450nm is also picked up by medium and long cones, while 400 is pretty much below their range.

yoodenvranx 11y ago

The big problem is that the color on the wall changes over the years. If you have to fix a scratch in a colored wall after 3 years you might as well just paint it new.

RobertKerans 11y ago

Our team at work had a very long-running argument last year with the general manager in charge of our main income-generating operation who wanted to base the search on the our main product site on product codes. Those product codes are fairly logical in the way they are structured, and are clearly very specific, and he just did not get why people looking for items might not find them far more useful than, say, names of things