How to Ensure Product Colors Match Under Daylight, Nightlight, Incandescent, and Fluorescent Lighting

light sources and color metamerism

Generally speaking the metamerism means the same color appeared differently under difference light souce, such as we buy a red dress in the store but it looks like dark red when we wear it go out, we can say this color phenomenon is metameris.

What Is Metamerism and Why Does It Occur?

Metamerism describes a pair of objects that match under a certain light source or set of viewing conditions, but not under another. The dress appeared to match in the incandescent lighting of shop, for example, but did not match under the daylight outside.

This is a common problem for many industries, due to different  such as textile manufacturers often with clothing pieces not matching under certain lighting due to variations in textile dyes used during manufacturing.

Metamerism isn’t problematic just for textile manufacturers, though. Companies in the paint, automotive, plastics, packaging, and print industries may have this issue because various pigments or color batches are sometimes changed when manufacturing or producing different parts of one product. An auto body shop might paint a section of a car, such as a door, with a color that appears to match the rest of the vehicle when viewed in daylight, but doesn’t match when viewed under parking lot lighting. In other examples, plastic manufacturers working with specialized pigments may have issues with their product showing inconsistent color only when viewed at a certain angle, and print companies may find that ink on one print page may not match the ink on another page only when viewed under natural daylight and fluorescent lighting. To prevent or reduce this mismatching problem, the color of the objects must be evaluated.

Minimizing Metamerism for Color Consistency

To identify metamerism, a light booth, colorimeter or spectrophotometer used to measure and evaluate the metameric properties of the specimens under two or more different illuminants, such as daylight (Standard Illuminant D65) and incandescent (Standard Illuminant A).