Although in most cases, color is all around us, it is not easy to describe. If I say I'll meet you in the lobby and will be wearing a red shirt and you can not find me because you interpret the color of the shirt I am wearing as orange, we have a difference in the definition and color awareness of red and orange. Technically - if you mix 50% red and 50% yellow you have orange but exactly how much yellow must be added to the red before you see it as orange ? and what is red anyway ?
This difference of opinion can happen as we stand side by side looking at the same piece of colored cloth - now what can happen if we are 1200 miles apart looking at two different monitors trying to pic the same color red from a chart consisting of many different swatches with percentages of red and yellow.

Have you ever viewed a television whose colors have not been adjusted correctly and the face of your favorite movie star looks kinda green or pale? If someone fools with the color balance knobs on the t.v. they can fix this problem - or make it worse. Computer monitors have the same problem - if they are not adjusted correctly they will show you a false color. How hard is it to get my monitor to have the exact same color as your monitor 1200 miles away - extremely if not impossible without an industry standard and software to help achieve this standard. But if we are not both on this standard adjusted the same and viewing under the same circumstances - we still may not always agree.

If your monitor has been calibrated correctly you should be able to make a color judgement - depending on how critical your judgement is. If you are judging the color of a matt for a particular image and looking at a monitor to make your choice, you already have a difference between reflected color ( the matt ) and transmitted color ( the monitor ). If able to compare the same color on a monitor and a matt side by side - the first thing you would notice is that the same color on the monitor appears brighter. Light coming through a color, as on a monitor, is more vibrant than color reflecting from a colored object ( the matt ) and if not controlled - the color projected by the monitor will be a different color temperature than the light reflecting off the matt. Yes light has a color temperature.

Computer monitor images have much lower resolution and often have color differences from the actual print.  The images you are viewing are at 72 dpi (dots per inch) versus 300 to 1440 dpi for the actual print.    This difference means that the print generally shows greater contrast, texture, tonal range, saturation, scale, etc. than a screen image.  In addition, computer monitors are often calibrated differently and can therefore introduce difference in brightness, contrast and color.  While we have made every effort to present images that represent the final print well, you should find that the actual print is even more appealing.  If you are not satisfied with the print you purchase, then please return the print for a full refund (see our Moneyback Guarantee). 

If you haven't gotten the idea by now, it's very hard to pick a color for your matt from the internet. The Hanging Image has chosen ten colors to represent on our site for you to choose from. We can not guarantee that when you receive your matted image that the matt color will appear exactly as you imagined it would when looking at the monitor. Our colors represented for choice are accompanied by a grey scale and a CMYK color chart, if all the greys are present and they appear neutral in color and the colors cyan magenta and yellow meet your approval, then your matt should arrive close to or with in acceptable tolerance of what you expected.

There are other and more complete explanations available on the internet. If you would like to learn more about color we recommend that you visit these sites: Computer Color Matters and http://cec.wustl.edu/ and color theory