Datacolor has come up with yet another innovation creating a new standard for unmeasurable colour.
Fast Fashion and online retail are changing the textile apparel industry, putting more pressure on brands to improve speed to the market by cutting production time and increasing operational efficiency.
Solid colour makes up half of the textiles produced by brands. For these, digital measurement with a spectrophotometer is the industry standard. The other half, the so called “unmeasurables”, multi-coloured and highly textured fabric such as prints, laces, yarns and trims, are still being evaluated visually. This manual process is unreliable, slow and costly.
To overcome these challenges, Datacolor has introduced the SpectraVision. This industry-transforming technology from Datacolor gives brands an unmistakable advantage when navigating fast-paced industry. This innovation retailers and their suppliers to objectively measure and digitally communicate the colour of materials that traditionally relied on subjective visual assessment. The solution eliminates human error to save costs, streamline workflows and dramatically reduce time from concept to consumer.
The Technology
Spectra Vision’s hardware component is a hyperspectral spectrophotometer- the most sophisticated of Datacolor’s colour measurement instruments. The technology ensures compatibility between solid and prints, as well as across product lines, guaranteeing consistency within and across supply chains, which is vital for creating a high-quality product while reducing costs and speeding up workflows.
How SpectraVision Works
- Measurement: The device creates 31 digital images of swatches through 31 filters. These are used to create the reflectance curves for each colour in the swatch. Colours within tolerance are grouped either automatically or manually to create colour separations.
- Assessment: SpectraVision’s software component, Tools SV, digitally mimics the current visuals approval process for “unmeasurables” to create a familiar workflow enabling easy adoption. Users can asses the data with a variety of features as the instrument creates colour collections for ease of management, automatically separates colours for greater efficiency and also hones assessments with quality parameters, including separation method adjustments, masking tools, border size and percentage coverage.
- Communication: Shareable files are created for each imaged colour region. User-defined fields and other data can be exported for reporting.
Advantages of SpectraVision
- It produces consistent, repeatable results: It removes subjectivity from colour measurement, ensures uniform assessment throughout the supply chain and it is compatible with the compatible standard.
- It saves up to 50% of colour approval process costs: It decreases the number of approval and review rounds, lowers shipment and maintenance costs by digitally storing colour standards and reduces the need for physical sample shipments.
- It shortens development and production processes by weeks or months: It has efficient colour management of garment components or coordinating sets, allows for digital communication of colorimetric data and enables agile responses to the current trends.
In a way, SpectraVision is the key in getting the full spectrum of possibilities for streamlining textile solutions.
