The question has arisen in the minds of all online shoppers at some point: "Does the item of clothing I see- and like- on my computer screen really look like what I'll get in the mail after I've purchased it?" Very often, the answer to this question is no. Online retailers often do not take the time to make sure that their apparel items are accurately displayed on their websites; instead, they leave it to their customers to guess about the true appearances of the items they are buying.

 

It was with this problem in mind that we set about defining our project. Our goal was to find a way to accurately display the color of a piece of clothing on an sRGB monitor (note that this process is not unique to clothing, and could be applied to many objects whose color is of concern). We divided our project into two different investigations. Investigation #1 follows the steps necessary to display a fabric's true color using its spectral power density (throughout this site, "true" is used loosely to describe how the color of the fabric should look under daylight conditions). Investigation #2 is concerned with what can be done with an image after it has been captured by a digital camera. In this part of our project, we explored how the image is processed by the camera and monitor, and how the color can best be corrected to obtain the true color. All data was gathered from 11 samples of different colors of fabric. Among the 11 samples, three were made of fleece, three were made of satin, three were made of linen, and two were made of velvet.