Lab Space: the Key to Successful Instrumental Shade Passing

AN LAB space, one of the most uniform, was not suitable for single number shade passing but, because it and its successor CIE LAB readily allow colour differences to be split into three components, it has permitted two methods of instrumental shade passing to be developed, which have been widely used in dyehouses and quality control laboratories, viz. colour–specific shade passing and the development of optimized equations. Three different methods of splitting are described in detail.