Colour measuring equipment

To specify red in the Munsell system could be:

Hue: 5R
Value: 6
Chroma: 14

Other commonly used systems in the textile industry are Scotdic and Pantone. Pantone is not in fact a colour order system but is a series of shades or shade library.

Colour order systems, however, help only in specifying a shade for a palette. That shade needs to be produced in a sample dyeing and then approved before made in production. Historically physical samples were made to the colour specification by eye; these samples were approved and then sent as standards for the dyers to produce bulked dyeings. This process proved to be unsatisfactory due to long lead times for many different reasons. First-time matching was almost impossible due to changes in the physical samples at each of the different locations due to environmental changes and interpretation of the shade.

Chroma denotes the strength of a colour at one of the 100 hue steps. Low chroma colours are near to the neutral and are therefore weak and increasing in equal visual steps to the strongest shade. For example a pink to a bright red.