FAQs

VeriVide manufacture specialist lighting and imaging tools for visual and digital assessment of colour and appearance. All products are manufactured at our Head Office in Enderby, Leicestershire and distributed globally by our network of distributors. VeriVide has been at the forefront of developing and updating worldwide and customer specific standards for over 57 years. Many global brands consult VeriVide when setting their global colour standards for suppliers. It is for this reason, that VeriVide has developed long-term relationships with supply chains throughout the world.

Who uses VeriVide products? Anyone who is interested in the colour or appearance of their product! VeriVide serves any industry where products must meet a visual quality goal. This means that our products are used in industries as varied as currency and identification card manufacturers, cosmetics, food and food packaging, pharmaceuticals and dish soap and all manner of textiles. We can help you to match a colour, look for physical faults and comply with international standards.

Standardised viewing conditions ensure your product represents the original concept or design in any environment. They refer to the specification for visual assessment which every brand and retailer should have and share with their supply chain. This document sets out the conditions for viewing the product including the angle of viewing, size of the sample, the type of colour standard and most importantly the light sources and viewing environment. Using standardised viewing conditions, the same decision will be reached each time visual assessment occurs.

Textile Retailer

Standardised viewing conditions help you ensure that the garments you produce are as faithful a representation of the original design as possible. It is important to avoid metamerism and to be aware of how they will look under store lighting (POS).

Textile Manufacturer

Standardised viewing conditions, often specified by your manufacturer, ensure that you can accurately produce garments as intended. Removing costly re runs or corrections and even loss of business. They ensure that the fabric looks how it should under your client’s point of sale lighting and it does not suffer from metamerism.

Dyer

Standardised lighting conditions replicate the spectrophotometer conditions and ensure that the recipes you formulated from the spectral data match the intended colour. Your customers need the products to match the colour standard under multiple light sources avoiding metamerism. For many of your clients visual assessment is still key; spectral data alone does not give them peace of mind.

Flexographic Printer

Standardised lighting helps flexographic printers working with brand or spot colours ensure they meet the high standards expected. VeriVide’s specialist print and packaging range ensures that finished products are accurate representations of the original design.

Quality Assurance

For quality assurance specialists, visual assessment is a vital part of ensuring high-quality products. Assessing colour and also appearance, is a vital part of many companies quality assurance. Food manufacturers use VeriVide light booths to ensure consistency and quality of large volumes of products, sometimes comparing against standard images created in DigiEye. For those working with composites, visual assessment is used to check for flaws. In any industry, viewing a product can be the difference between product failure and the high-quality products their customers expect.

Technical Textiles

Technical Textiles manufacturers and end users use VeriVide light booths to highlight imperfections and colour issues. Visual assessment is a vital part of ensuring that standards are upheld and customers are happy. This is especially true in industries where perfection is expected by the end clients such as luxury automotives.

Lithographic Printer

VeriVide CCC’s are used to ensure consistency of colour and quality of print runs against proofs. VeriVide CCC’s are also used in showrooms to aid client presentations and demonstrate capability to build and retain business. In a highly competitive industry that is constantly in search of an advantage, standardised assessment conditions allow for consistent replication of colour and colour branding. VeriVide products allow you to visually assess deviation of spot colours against colour standards as well as between proofs and samples from print runs.

VeriVide do not sell Pantone paint. We can sell you the Pantone colour standard which your supplier can match to. Pantone is a copyrighted colour system and they do not make paint either! Pantone provides colour standards used by brands and manufacturers, enabling people to communicate colour and set colour specifications The colour system is licensed to manufacturers of a range of coloured products. Click here for full details of companies holding Pantone licenses for production of coloured materials including paint, powder coat and inks. Unfortunately due to restrictions on shipping paint it must be manufactured in the Country in which it is to be used and therefore Pantone paint is only available where a License is approved to manufacture it. Paint for interiors is in some Pantone colours is now available in a number of Countries in Europe. In the UK some Pantone colours are available as Crown Trade paints in various finishes through Brewers Decorating Centres  , they offer some Pantone Graphics Coated colours in their trade range, Valspar (UK) Corporation Limited were also a licensee - for more information contact them at http://www.valsparpaint.co.uk or Email: customerservice@valsparpaint.co.uk. Please note Pantone colours that are available may be limited to current trend colours and not available in all finishes.

How can I buy a Pantone Colour in paint if it is not part of the pre mixed range?

You will need to purchase a colour standard for the required colour. This can be a Pantone book or a Replacement Page for a Pantone book or even a fabric swatch (depending on the Pantone range your colour is from).  VeriVide can sell you the correct colour sample to provide the standard for paint matching. Once you have the colour target (standard) you need to identify a paint wholesaler with colour mixing equipment. They can measure the colour, formulate the pigments required and mix paint to match the specific colour.

To ensure consistency and agreement, visual assessment should be performed under the same lighting conditions at each stage of the supply chain. When viewing under the same lighting conditions, you are creating ‘standardised assessment conditions’. These conditions will improve consistency of results and ultimately mean more accurate decisions and better business outcomes. Visual assessment is simply viewing a product, object or sample. The purpose of visual assessment is to make a judgement on how a product appears. Whether this is to ensure a sample garment looks as intended prior to mass manufacture or to assess particulate contamination during pharmaceutical manufacturing, the fundamentals stay the same. There is an observer and there is an object or sample. However, the results of visual assessment can vary immensely. If you are viewing a fabric sample for a sofa at your office window during the winter, the colour and appearance will differ greatly from what a manufacturer in Piedmont, Italy is seeing at their window and a buyer at a New York department store will see under point of sale lighting, due to the different properties of the light. This will cause differences of opinion, which can delay production times at best and at worst result in loss of sales and penalties for suppliers. VeriVide is a trusted provider of standardised assessment conditions for a number of industries and have developed and maintained standards for over 50 years.

To convert RAL to Pantone and Pantone to RAL is difficult. These are separate colour systems and we recommend buying a book of each to check. Each company owns the IP of their respective colours and there has been no collaboration to produce a chart for translation from one system to another. Other companies (particularly paint companies) have attempted to cross reference RAL and Pantone colours but they cannot always be trusted. If you search the web you may find paint suppliers offering translations for RAL Classic colours but these can be quite far apart in colour space. RAL Classic colours were developed for external paint colours whereas Pantone was developed for printing inks and later for textile dyes. To convert RAL to Pantone we recommend that you purchase the relevant RAL Guide and Pantone Guide and check yourself under controlled lighting conditions in a light booth.

Can I get RAL colours in Dulux paint? A small range of RAL Classic colours can be purchased in Dulux trade paint, as can some British Standard colours. Dulux is an Akzo Nobel brand name which was originally developed by ICI. The brand name ‘Dulux’ is a combination of ‘Durable’ and ‘Luxury’. Most colours marketed under the brand are their own colour range with unique names designed to appeal to the public.    

NCS paint is not sold by VeriVide. We can supply a colour standard to take to your supplier, they will measure and mix the colour from available pigments. NCS do not manufacture paint or powder coat. Paint manufacturers are licenced to use NCS colours in their paints and coating formulas, likewise manufacturers of laminates and other materials can use the colours. NCS is a colour system, they  standardise the colours so you can buy the colour card from VeriVide (or other worldwide distributor) and then go to a DIY store or specialised paint supplier to buy the paint. They may have a paint mixing machine on site and can measure the colour card and mix paint to the correct colour to match the card. For a comprehensive list of approved manufacturers go to the website of NCS Colour  

RAL is a colour standard system containing a total of 2531 colours, 1825 in the Design range, 216 in the Classic range and 490 in the Effect range. RAL is predominantly used for specifying the colour of paints, varnishes, epoxy resins, plastics and powder coated metals. Architects and Interior designers use RAL colours for construction projects and they are also used in aerospace, automotive and marine exteriors and interiors.