The questions about colour that come up at work and at home, answered with the evidence attached. Every page separates established fact from convention, forecast and Colourwise’s own interpretation, and names its sources.
429 topics · 1934 evidence-labelled claims · 1212 sources
How light, eyes, instruments and numbers describe colour.
How colour is measured with instruments rather than eyes: colorimeters, spectrophotometers, measurement geometry, standard observers and illuminants, and what a ΔE number does and does not tell you..
18 topics
RGB, CMYK, HSL, Lab, OKLCH, Munsell, NCS and the rest: what each was designed for, why they disagree about the same colour, and which to use for which job..
12 topics
The sky, the sea, snow, fog and sunset each change colour for a physical reason, and so do the places people look at colour: galleries, shops, stages and night-time streets.
15 topics
How living things make colour and what the evidence says it is for: pigments, structural colour, fluorescence and bioluminescence, cells that change colour, and the research on camouflage, warning, mimicry and signalling..
14 topics
Why colour changes between devices and media, and how professionals control it.
Why the same HEX value looks different on two screens, what sRGB, Display P3 and Rec.
15 topics
Why a print does not match the screen, what happens to a bright blue in CMYK, why a black prints brown, and when a spot colour is worth it.
16 topics
How a camera turns light into colour, why phones disagree with each other, why product photos lie, what colour grading and film processes do to a picture, and how to get colour you can trust from a photograph..
17 topics
How colour is captured, graded and delivered on screen: film stocks and photochemical timing, the digital intermediate, log encoding and scene-referred working, ACES, HDR and broadcast delivery, and the documented colour choices of particular productions..
12 topics
Colour on real surfaces: how it is manufactured, how it behaves and how it ages.
How colour is manufactured: pigments, dyes, lakes and inks; opacity and tinting strength; lightfastness; effect and interference pigments; colour that changes with heat, light or voltage; and what happens to colourants when material is recycled..
19 topics
How factories keep a colour the same from batch to batch: the standards a batch is judged against, how a tolerance is written and why it differs between industries, what an instrument reading can and cannot settle, and how to trace a mismatch to its cause..
13 topics
Why colour fades, yellows and darkens, how conservators measure and slow it, and what light exposure actually costs a painting, a photograph or a curtain..
24 topics
How colour works on a shelf and on a product: category conventions, what research does and does not show about colour and expectation, finishes, the gap between the digital pack and the printed one, and how colour and decoration choices affect whether packaging can be sorted and recycled..
14 topics
The chemistry behind the colour of food: the pigments plants and animals make, what cooking, acidity and oxygen do to them, how the colour of coffee, beer, wine, tea, honey, maple syrup and spices is measured and graded, and what the evidence says about colour and appetite..
19 topics
Colour with a job: safety, public space, charts and software.
The colours that are specified rather than chosen: safety signs, pipe and cable identification, signal lights, navigation lights and accessibility requirements.
15 topics
Colour at the scale of buildings and streets: façades, heritage districts, hospitals, stations and wayfinding, glare, and the measurable effect of a surface's reflectance on heat..
12 topics
Why places are the colours they are: the stone, clay and earth pigments under a region, the light and climate it sits in, the building traditions that followed, and the heritage rules that now keep those colours in place..
10 topics
Choosing colour for charts and maps: categorical, sequential and diverging palettes, why rainbow scales mislead, and how to keep a chart readable in greyscale, dark mode and for colour-vision deficiency..
11 topics
Colour as infrastructure in software: semantic tokens, state colours, dark mode, focus indicators and theming, and how to build a palette that survives every screen it lands on..
10 topics
What colour everyday life actually is, how it changed, and what forecasters claim.
How the visible colour of everyday things has changed, measured where measurement exists: cars, consumer objects, interiors and products.
12 topics
Car colour is the best-documented colour market there is: industry reports have counted the colour of new vehicles for decades.
8 topics
Every year several organisations each announce their own 'colour of the year'.
6 topics
What colour costs and what it earns: the pigments and materials behind it and what they sell for, what a colour choice adds to making a product, and where colour measurably changes a price — with the measured figures kept apart from the explanations people offer for them..
16 topics
Symptom-first diagnosis across paint, screens, print, photos and materials.
Topics added to longer-standing sections of the site.