FAQ
- What is this?
It's a tool to compare colors from digital sources to the colors available from the most popular brands of fusing beads, including Perler®.
- Why?
Making bead art from sources like video games and traditional art has been a popular pastime for decades. These sources have millions of colors available to them, even when digitized (the standard RGB color space, abbreviated as sRGB, has over sixteen million colors), and of course bead manufacturers can't make that many. This tool helps bridge the gap between what we perceive and what is available to us for beading - and I do mean us, as I started this tool to help me and my daughter with our own projects.
- How Does it Work?
When a user picks a color from the color picker (using the sRGB palette), that color is converted to the CIELAB colorspace and compared to a list of around 350 color options from various bead manufacturers. The comparison uses the Delta E 2000 formula, the CIE standard for determining the perceptual differences between color, to mathematically find the difference between what humans will broadly see and process.
When a color is picked, the system will calculate the Delta E between the chosen color and the available set of bead colors to produce a top three matches followed by a set of eight relatively close matches, for you to further evaluate yourself. The "difference" value shown represents the Delta E between your choice and the color selected by the system; ideal matches would have a Delta E below 1, but most selections are likely to fall in the 2-20 range - close, but visibly different.
- Why Does it Sometimes Rank Options Weirdly?
Have you picked a color where the top three options don't look as good as something from the bottom set of eight? That happens, and it's probably a little bit different for every person based on how individuals have microdifferences in how they perceive color. Good luck proving it, though!
Generally speaking, though, sometimes you're likely to see a color that you think is a better match than the "best" match the computer sees, and that's because the math involved is purely digital and your analog eyes and brain might just see something a little differently than the math does. It's why we provide so many options instead of just the best Delta E number. It's also why you'll sometimes see colors that the system picks out that just aren't even close.
- How Did You Develop the Data for the Bead Colors?
I didn't, for most of it - while I have a big collection of Perler colors, I certainly don't have every single one ever made, and I haven't used the other brands personally. I used the RGB choices made by whatever amazing person made the Bead Colors reference (and of course all the contributors aggregated there) and converted them to LAB myself, as LAB is a better colorspace for calculating Delta E.
- I Think This Color Is Wrong?
If Bead Colors gets updated, I may not see it. Feel free to let me know, I'm easy to find on the intersites. Or if you think you have a better hexadecimal match to an existing color, that's great too.
- How Does the Page Work?
I built this not just because it would be useful to me and my daughter, but also because I'm a web UX developer by trade and I needed a small project to help me learn some new things, specifically in this case NextJS with TypeScript and TailwindCSS. This was a good chance for me to get my feet wet in those frameworks before I needed them in my day job, and while this is a relatively simple thing, it was useful to me to piece it together over a couple days.
The packages used are:
- Why the Affiliate Links?
Well, it's convenient to be able to try to buy the colors that are the best matches, right? And if you need them and I get a few cents from Amazon for helping you find them, everyone wins a bit.