Colors, Dyes, and Screens

This article is about color consistency in leather, and the different ways colors can appear under different lighting and on different device screens.

Factory Dyed Leather

This wallet features stamping, carving, and multicolored dyes, all techniques requiring I start with un-dyed leather

Some leather-workers buy factory dyed leathers, and for this reason they are able to offer perfect color consistency across different products and over many years.

Not having to dye the leather themselves also saves them a ton of time and effort. This convenience does not come without trade-offs however.

The sort of decorative work that I do, tooling and engraving, can only be done before dying the leather. The first step in those processes is to soak the leather in water. If you try doing that to pre-dyed leather, you will find the water will ruin the dye, leaving the leather a blotchy mess.

The more elaborate dye work that I do, featuring multiple colors, is of course only possible when starting with an un-dyed surface.

While I can take precautions to ensure that a batch of items ordered all at once in closely matching in color, I will not be able to do much to match an item ordered years ago without having that item on hand.

Natural Materials

These un-decorated trays appear a bit lighter than the more textured trays shown below.

Most people know about the grain of wood, the pattern of lines and knots running across the surface. Leather has a grain too, the unique texture and pattern of that particular piece of leather. These natural variations can change the outcome when the same mixture of dyes is applied to two different pieces of leather, even if they came from the same animal.

Different pieces of leather can be more or less absorbent, some drink up dye like a sponge, while others have a more tightly woven grain and take up dye much less aggressively.

These trays have been decorated with a basket weave tooling pattern along the bottom. The texture means these turned out a bit darker than the set shown above.

Leather with a rougher surface texture will hold onto much more of the pigments I use to create contrast between my decorative tooling work and the surface of the leather and will turn out noticeably darker as a result.

I can react to and mitigate the situations above to a certain extent, but while I keep color consistency in mind, the primary goal is the achieve a deep, rich, and attractive finish. If a piece turns out unusually dark or light, but otherwise has a deep, rich, and attractive finish, I consider that a success.

Screen Specifications and Settings

Your phone, your TV, and your computer monitor are all probably built a little differently, using different technologies, and if you put the same image on all three screens and looked very closely, you would find that the colors of the images would all be a little different. If you take the exact same phone and look at an image with the brightness turned up and then with the brightness turned way down, the colors would again be very different.

It is becoming more and more popular for phone screens to tint themselves red late at night, to reduce blue light which has been shown to interfere with peoples circadian rhythm. Any image on that screen will of course see significant changes to the colors.

To view my photos as accurately as possible you should view them on a comfortably bright screen, in a well lit room.

Lighting Temperature

Adjusted to Warm Lighting

The pictures throughout my shop have been color corrected to represent the item under neutral daylight. Artificial lighting can run cooler or warmer.

Most offices have cooler lights, most homes favor warmer lights. Lighting temperature of course has a huge impact on the way we perceive colors. Here are some ways to keep this in mind as you buy.

Adjusted to Cool Lighting

Here are two of the same image, the first picture has been adjusted to appear under a very warm light. The green doesn't look as good, but the red and the brown look great.

The second has been adjusted to appear under very cool light. The green looks quite a bit better here, but the red and brown looks worse. The black looks just as good in either situation, and is always a safe and classic choice.

No-Questions Asked Returns and Exchanges

If you don't like the color of the item you received, or you want to return or exchange it for any other reason, contact me to arrange a return. The requirements for doing so are outlined here on the returns page.