What is CIE-LAB?
Also known as: LAB color space, CIELAB
Updated
A color space designed to match human visual perception, where Euclidean distance approximates perceived color difference. The standard workspace for professional color matching in textiles.
How does CIE-LAB describe a colour?
CIE-LAB (also written CIELAB or just 'LAB') is a perceptually uniform color space defined by the International Commission on Illumination in 1976. Its three axes are: L* (lightness, 0-100), a* (green-red, -128 to +127), and b* (blue-yellow, -128 to +127). The defining property is perceptual uniformity: equal Euclidean distances in LAB space correspond to roughly equal perceived color differences. This makes it the natural workspace for color matching algorithms (colour clustering, Delta E calculation, gradient analysis) because the math actually corresponds to what the eye sees. RGB and CMYK are device-dependent and non-uniform; LAB is device-independent and uniform. Professional textile color workflows convert to LAB for analysis and back to RGB or CMYK only for display or production output. CIE-LAB is also the workspace where textile colour references are defined; every colour in the Texloom colour library is stored as a LAB triplet, with the conversion to printable RGB or CMYK done at the production end. This is why a LAB reference holds across monitors and fabric types: the source-of-truth is perceptually uniform.
What do the L, a and b numbers look like for a real colour?
A colour separation clusters 2 million pixels in LAB space. Two cluster centroids at L*60 a*30 b*-10 and L*62 a*32 b*-12 are perceptually almost identical (Delta E ~3), so the separation algorithm merges them into one channel rather than producing two visibly identical clusters.
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