What's Your L,a,b? Promotion

The Hunter L,a,b colour scale evolved during the 1950s and 1960s. At that time many of the scientists involved with colour measurement were working with colour scales that took quite a lot of effort and understanding to interpret but these scales did not visually relate to what the human saw and made it difficult for organisations to set a standard to work to.

A gentleman called Mr Richard Hunter invented the L,a,b colour scale that took the theory that we don’t just “see” colour we also talk about how light or dark the object is.

Look at this picture of the Hunter Lab colour Space.

If you present an object to a Colorimeter or a Spectrophotometer you will be able to view the L,a,b values.

To work out this L,a,b value of:

L:     39.00

A:  - 6.00

B : - 34.00

We always look at the “L” Value first as a reading of 100 is white or very bright, 50 is grey or not to light not too dark and 0 is black or very dark.

So the reading of 39.00 is closer to dark, making the product we measured “darker”

As the a and b values represent the “colour” of the object we pick the biggest number first ( ignoring the positive and negative sign for now) we find that “B” is the bigger number out of the two.

The “b” is a negative number so as the diagram above shows, if it is negative b it would be a blue colour.

The “a” value is also a negative number and therefore points is in the direction of green but as the value is a lot smaller there is not much green in the product.

To describe the overall colour we would say it would be: a Dark Blue.

We are launching a new competition that sees 1 lucky winner, win the new Apple Ipad. Simply tell us by email what colour our L,a,b values are and you can be in with a chance to win.

What is this colour?

L:  55.00

a: - 25.00

b: - 0.50

For further information on working this out and how using the L,a,b scale properly can save your organisation effort and production costs as well as keep your customers happy please contact Tom on +44 (0) 844 2250 422 option 2 or email sales@thinkstothard.com