The Desktop Application

Everything a designer needs to choose a colour and get it into their work is on this site, free and without an account. A few things cannot sensibly live in a browser — and one of them is the question people ask most often: what will this look like on my paper?

What the website does, and will keep doing

On the site
The whole libraryAll 4253 colours, three measurement conditions, nothing held back
Eleven illuminants, two observersComputed live from the spectra as you switch
Nineteen RangesWhich print conditions can reproduce which colours
Every exportCxF, CGATS, ACB, ASE — any subset, built in your browser
Every page in LearnIn full. The knowledge is not the product.

No registration, no fee, no upload. Files are assembled on your own machine when you press Download; nothing about what you looked at leaves it.

Substrate simulation — what needs the application

ChromaSpot was measured on one stock, and that stock has an OBA index of 6.46 — a fairly bright office-grade paper. Yours is almost certainly different. An uncoated board with no brightener at all sits at 0; a heavily brightened sheet can reach around 9.7.

Given the index of the paper you are actually printing on, the entire library can be recomputed for it. Not one colour — all of them, at whatever brightener level you specify, including levels between and beyond the three measured conditions.

The distinction the site is careful about. M0, M1 and M2 are measured and ship with the library. Any other brightener level is computed from them. Both are useful; conflating them is not, and keeping the computed one in a separate application is the plainest way of saying which is which.

The rest of what belongs on a desktop

FeatureWhy not in a browser
Your own ICC profiles as Ranges The profile is a file on your machine, and the whole point is that it never leaves it
Your own measured light A lighting measurement is data you own; the site offers the eleven standard ones
Colour inconstancy with full adaptation A proper CII adapts the observer to each light; the browser shows the simpler figure and says so
Batch work Whole palettes against whole sets of conditions, written to files

Where it stands

In preparation, for macOS and Windows, working on local files rather than on an account. There is no release date to give and no sign-up to collect — when there is something to try, it will be announced here.

If you measure colour today, CC Capture already drives most instruments on the market and will find the nearest ChromaSpot code for anything you measure, in trial mode, free and without registration.

What will not move behind a paid tier: the library itself, its spectra, the exports, and everything in Learn. A colour library that charges for the colours is not infrastructure, and infrastructure is what this is meant to be.

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