Date
Thursday, October 8, 2026
Time
11:00 a.m EST
Location
Virtual Event
Price
Member: Free
Non-Member: $99.00
CIELAB at 50: How we put a number on color
In 1976, America celebrated its bicentennial—and the color science community introduced something that would have an enormous impact on how industries communicate and control color: CIELAB.
Fifty years later, Lab* values and Delta E are part of the everyday language of print and packaging. But where did those numbers come from, and how closely do they actually represent the way humans see color?
Join color scientist Dr. John Seymour for a journey through the history of color measurement, beginning with the early experiments of Maxwell and Helmholtz, the development of RGB color matching, and the experiments that eventually produced the CIE standard observer and XYZ tristimulus values. From there, we’ll explore the work that led to the creation of CIELAB in 1976 and the continued development of color-difference formulas such as CIEDE2000.
As CIELAB celebrates its 50th birthday, this conversation will look not only at how modern colorimetry got here, but also at what advances in our understanding of human vision could mean for the next generation of color measurement.
Speakers
John Seymour
John Seymour is an applied mathematician and color scientist, teaching color science at Clemson University and consulting as “John the Math Guy”. John holds 31 US patents and has authored almost 100 published technical papers, articles and conference presentations. He is currently chair of American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) E12-06 committee on Display, Imaging and Imaging Colorimetry, member of Flexographic Quality Council committee, and has served on the boards of Technical Association for the Graphic Arts (TAGA) and Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC). His blog has nearly 200 posts which have been viewed over one million times. His relatively new YouTube channel has over 800 subscribers and has had over 45,000 views. Before embarking on a career as consultant, Seymour played a leading role for 25 years in QuadTech’s advanced product development group, where he developed algorithms and instrumentation for color management of printers. Prior to that he was a computer programmer in a variety of scientific fields.
