Library Browser

Six ways of finding a colour among four thousand, a filter for what your process can print, and three settings that change what the numbers mean. What each control does, and when to touch it.

Finding a colour

No flat view of a three-dimensional space is honest, so there are six, each cutting it differently. Try more than one.

View	Good for
Chroma	Browsing by family. The wheel divides into the hue sectors, and clicking one shows everything in it.
Hue	One hue family at a time, plotted with lightness up the side and chroma across — the clearest picture of what a family actually contains.
Lightness	Everything at one L, which is how you find a colour that has to sit beside another at the same weight.
LCH	Type a lightness, chroma and hue angle. Either a tolerance around it, or a ΔE₀₀ radius.
LAB	Paste Lab values from anywhere and see what is near them. The fastest route if you already have a measurement.
Search	Type a code or part of a name.

Have a measurement already? Paste it into LAB and set the mode to ΔE₀₀. A radius of 2.5 shows everything closer than the average distance between neighbours — which is a fair definition of “the library has this colour”.

Subset — how much library you want

Subset	Colours	For
Basic	500	choosing — small enough to look through
Essential	2000	matching — 95% of the library within 4.01 ΔE₀₀
Full	4253	the specification
Scratchpad	yours	whatever you collected with the plus button

They nest. What each is worth, measured: Subset Statistics.

Range — what your process can actually print

Nineteen print conditions, each an ICC profile. Select one and the list drops to the colours it reproduces within 2.5 ΔE₀₀. Select several and a colour has to satisfy all of them — the real question for a product printed more than one way.

The spread is wide: from 100% of the library down to 23% for newsprint. Full list and what it means: Ranges: all nineteen.

Color Spec. — the three settings that change the numbers

They do not change which colours exist, only what the colorimetry says about them.

M-condition

Which of the three measurements you are looking at. Every sample was measured under all three.

	The instrument’s lamp
M2 — the default	D50 with the ultraviolet cut. What a sample looks like with the paper’s brighteners switched off, and what the codes are derived from.
M1	D50 including its ultraviolet. Brighteners working.
M0	Incandescent, unfiltered. The oldest convention.

Switching to M1 moves 55% of the library by more than one ΔE₀₀, and the neutrals move most — a colour that is exactly grey under M2 turns blueish under M1, because that is what the paper underneath it is doing. If you are hunting for neutrals under M1, use the LAB view rather than the N family.

Measuring and Viewing covers the standards on both sides of this, and Optical Brighteners measures the effect.

Illuminant

The light the colorimetry is computed under. Eleven standard ones. Print works at D50; interiors and automotive at D65; the F-series describe fluorescent tubes and are the closest thing in the list to a shop.

Every sample is recomputed from its spectrum when you switch, so the swatches change too. That is not a display trick — it is what those colours do under that light. How far each one moves: Inconstancy: the full matrix.

Observer

2° for print and graphic arts; 10° for large fields — interiors, vehicles, textiles. The codes are derived at 2°.

Changing this alone moves the median colour by 1.98 ΔE₀₀, with no change of light at all, which is further than the distance to the next swatch in the book. It is the setting most often left wrong and least often noticed: Light, Spectrum, Observer.

Scratchpad

The plus button on any colour adds it. The scratchpad survives closing the browser and needs no account, but it lives on your own machine: clearing your browser data clears it, and nobody can recover it.

Export it like any other subset: choose Scratchpad in the download dialog. A palette of twelve is more use to a client than a library of four thousand.

Sample Preview

Click any colour and the panel opens with everything known about it.

Panel	What it is telling you
The spectral curve	Reflectance from 380 to 730 nm — the colour itself, before any light or observer is assumed.
CIELab and LCH	The same colour twice: cartesian and polar. Both follow the Color Spec. settings above.
CMYK	Process values through a reference offset profile, and the ΔE₀₀ of converting back. Read that number as a warning — a large one means the process build is already a different colour.
RGB	sRGB values and their own round-trip figure.

Either round-trip figure turns red above 3, which is the panel saying the conversion did not survive.

Downloading

The download button takes the current subset, measurement condition and Range filter and writes a file. Four formats, and the choice matters: two carry the spectrum, two do not. See File Formats.

Files are built in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and no record is made of what you chose.

What is not here. Your own ICC profiles as a Range, your own measured lighting, and simulating a substrate with a different brightener level — those work on local files and belong in the desktop application.