Swatch
A weekend experiment in matching physical fabric swatches to on-screen colour, and a lesson in how much of perceived colour is the viewing environment rather than the pigment.
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Side project
- Built with
- TypeScript, WebGL, colour science
The idea
Buyers approve colour on uncalibrated laptops in mixed lighting, then get samples that look wrong. I wanted to know how far software could close that gap.
What I learned
Not very far, without a reference. Matching in a perceptually uniform space (Oklab) beat sRGB comfortably, but the dominant error term is ambient light and display profile, not the maths. Shipping a paper reference card with the sample would outperform anything I could do in the browser.
Kept as an experiment because the honest conclusion was that this is not a software problem.