Last week, in our continuing look at DIY Photography in our 'Photography Monday' Video Corner videos, we learned about monitors & calibration. This week we take a look at "Delta E Tolerance" - what it is and how to test your tolerance with the Pilot Color Tolerance Exercise. Obviously, unless you get very serious about printing your own photographs, this process is not necessary for you to go through. That being said, it's never a bad idea to know what goes on behind the scenes at your favorite printing lab, right?

Delta E Tolerance Exercise

The Pilot Color Tolerance Exercise is designed to be a fast, simple, accurate way to determine a person's or company's tolerance for an acceptable color match. This exercise compares a person's visual perception of an acceptable color match with a known, numeric standard to determine color differences, called delta E.

It is designed to be a stand-aline exercise, capable of being taken by an individual at any time. Groups of people can also do it together. People doing the exercise do not have to know anything about color except knowing what they believe to be an acceptable match.

The delta E tolerance exercise is very helpful for any company involved in reproducing color. If your company has been looking to implement process control procedures, calibration and/or color profiling tools, this exercise gives you an easily workable, quantifiable system to base your efforts on.

Until now, because everybody has a different view of what is an acceptable color match, it has been very hard to quantify tolerances of color value. Using a lot of trial and error experiences used to be the only real way to determine what a person's tolerance was, which was often frustrating and lead to unattainable expectations.