The journey of understanding human colour vision represents a remarkable testament to human curiosity and scientific progress, spanning over two millennia of observation, theory, and experimentation. This has involved some of the greatest minds in science, philosophy, and art from all cultures across the globe, and continues to this day. It involves the interplay of physical stimuli, neural processing, and cultural bias. Given the importance of colour in the appreciation of cultural heritage, it is not surprising that colour difference measurements have become routine in the field of heritage science. The apparent simplicity of taking the measurements with modern tools hides the complexities of colour systems, leading to results often lacking an appropriate estimation of uncertainty. This paper presents an analysis of large sets of colour measurements, and associated colour difference calculations, taken from a range of colour swatches and Spectralon colour/reflectance standards using a portable spectrometer and a bench-top UV-VIS spectrometer. The data are used to develop a simplified approach allowing reliable estimates of uncertainties in CIEDE2000 colour difference to be made.
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Pretzel et al. (2026) studied this question.