How Many Colours?

Scientists believe there are over 18 decillion varieties of each color. A computer screen can display approx. 16.8 million colors to create a full-color picture.

When talking about colours, there are three main color models used in printing and screen design. PMS (Pantone Matching System), CMYK, RGB/HEX.

RGB comes from the three primary colors used to make the model (aka Red, Green, Blue), this color model is the most standard and widely used. Each of the red, green and blue components have 256 different intensities, this creates 256 x 256 x 256 equaling a staggering 16,777,216 distinct colours. This color model is primarily used for digital formats and creates colors by adding red green and blue light to show a color on a screen. HEX stands for hexadecimal and is a numbering system that is used to represent each colour in the RGB.

CMYK uses four colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (aka Black). By varying percentages of these four colors, it can create 16,000 combinations. This is the standard color model used for most printing processes.

Pantone insures the same level of accuracy regardless of how the colour is being used or manufactured, Pantone is used for identifying and matching specific colors, mostly used in printing and is created by using pre-mixed formulas of ink to achieve a specific colour.

DMC

So what is DMC and why is it used?

DMC is for lack of a better term a subset or a specific palette of RGB colours. This is why a lot of colours from other companies such as Diamond Dots or in cross stitch Anchor can be converted or matched to DMC as they both use an original RGB color HEX. DMC has simply brought a wide selection of prominently used colors to a more workable number, currently there are 447 DMC colors in diamond drills or in cross stitch about 500 colours. These are the colours most widely used to obtain a reasonable replication of an image, such as a photo which would have millions of colours to it especially if the image is high resolution. So DMC is really just a universal color palette used a lot in art and craft. Other examples of colour palettes would be in painting, such as Dulux or Jo Sonja colour ranges, these are not unique colours, rather a unique set of RGB or Pantone colours to used to create a colour code for the purpose required.

Colour Conversions

One of the trickiest components of creating a diamond painting or cross stitch pattern that requires pixilation is the colour conversion process. This is taking an image that uses millions of colors down to using hundreds and producing a replication of the image without losing a large amount of detail.

There are really two main points that determines the amount of detail that can be achieved. Detail is what makes an image go from good to great!

The first is the size, the larger the design the more detail there can be. The smaller the design the less detail you are able to capture. This is because with larger designs you can use more pixels and therefore more colors, this allows finer details as opposed to more block colours.

The second is the amount of colours used in your palette. If you have a detailed image such as a high resolution photo and you restrict the colors to say the DMC palette it can only use the maximum amount of colours available in diamond painting 447. However if you did not restrict the use to the DMC colour palette many more colours would be available to use, offering more intermediary colours to blend or refine allowing for higher levels of detail and a cleaner end product.

The challenge with this and why DMC is used as a mainstream color code is that the manufacturing and stock requirement process to make millions of colours to then combine is quite costly and unrealistic. DMC bas picked the most amount of usable colors to produce a reasonably good image quality and that is why these are the drills that are usually manufactured.