Personal Color Card

Print a personal colour palette on A4 and hold it against real fabric.

Read first
This is not a colour reference chart

Home printers compress tonal range (measured: up to ΔL* 14). But every colour shifts the same way, so the relationships between colours survive. Use it as a relative comparison tool against fabric.

01

Pick your tone

Choose the tone you were diagnosed with. Every PDF contains all eight tones with yours marked — a tone can only be judged against its neighbours.

Print correction No correction (A5 / B5) Adjust correction
Spring
Spring Light Spring Light Warm

Light, soft warm. Pastel side

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Spring Bright Spring Bright Warm

Vivid warm. Toward pure hues

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Summer
Summer Light Summer Light Cool

Light, soft cool. Powdery

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Summer Mute Summer Mute Cool

Muted, calm cool. Greyish

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Autumn
Autumn Mute Autumn Mute Warm

Muted, deep warm. Earthy

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Autumn Deep Autumn Deep Warm

Dark, saturated warm

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Winter
Winter Bright Winter Bright Cool

Vivid, cold pure hues

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
Winter Deep Winter Deep Cool

Dark, cold. High contrast

8 hue families
Neutral ramp
02

What is in the PDF (13 pages)

Page 1

Overview (8 hue families + neutrals × 8 tones)

For seeing relationships. Not for fabric matching

Pages 2-9

Full-width bars, one hue family per sheet

The pages you hold against fabric

Pages 10-12

Neutrals across tones — white / mid grey / black

"Which white shirt, which black trousers?"

Page 13

Your tone's neutral ramp (white → black)

Baseline for wardrobe staples

Hue familiesRedOrangeYellowGreenTealBluePurplePink

03

Neutrals differ by tone too

A white shirt and black trousers are wardrobe staples, but which white and which black suit you depends on your tone. That is why neutrals get their own sheets.

Spring · Autumn (warm)

Light end
Ivory · cream
Dark end
Brown instead of true black

Summer (cool · soft)

Light end
Off-white
Dark end
Charcoal instead of true black

Winter (cool · high contrast)

Light end
Pure white
Dark end
True black

A single chip cannot express a neutral either — the range from white to black is itself the character of a tone, so it is given as a ramp.

04

How to use it

  1. Print in colour at 100% actual size (never "fit to page")
  2. Check the scale by measuring the 50mm ruler with a real ruler
  3. On a family sheet, cut along a colour boundary — you get a strip whose two long edges are pure colour
  4. Hold that edge flush against the fabric — any white gap between them ruins the comparison
  5. Judge in daylight
05

Print settings

Scale
100% / actual size
Colour
Colour, not greyscale
Colour management
Off — ICM, photo enhancement and sharpening, all of it
Paper
Matte (gloss reflects and defeats comparison)
06

Printer colour correction

Optional

Every printer is slightly biased. Consumer printers have no calibration function, so instead of correcting the printer we shift the file the opposite way before printing. If your printer runs +2 toward red, the file gets −2.

  1. Print one copy of the finder sheet Download the finder sheet
  2. Look at it by a window in daylight with every indoor lamp off. Warm lighting makes bluish patches read as neutral and skews the call
  3. In row A pick the patch where green ends and red begins; in row B where blue ends and yellow begins
  4. Select those two labels on the right and you get a palette corrected by that much

Set your correction

No correction (A5 / B5)

A5 / B5 means no correction. Changing them makes the download buttons on the tone cards generate a corrected PDF on the spot.

You can skip this entirely. Measured cast was around ΔE 2, while tonal compression (ΔL* 14) is a 3-4× larger error — the correction is nice to have, not required.

07

Known limits

Tonal compression

Dark colours print lighter than intended (measured up to ΔL* 14).

Metamerism

Under shop lighting, ink and fabric shift differently. A match indoors can break in the shop.

Gamut

Some winter greens and teals fall outside sRGB and had their chroma reduced (hue and lightness preserved). The affected bars are marked.

The tone definitions are our own

Personal colour analysis has no standard colour specification. We do not print numbers like "92% match".

Tone definitions are our own, built on CIE L*a*b* (no PCCS, no PANTONE).
This page pins its background to a fixed neutral grey — a changing background makes the same colour look different through simultaneous contrast, so there is no dark mode.