Stiligts color school: NCS
If you’ve been to the paint store and looked through the paint samples, you’ve probably come across the term NCS and perhaps wondered what it means. We at Stiligt’s color school will try to clarify the concepts in a more understandable way and show you how to use the system. The letters NCS stand for “Natural Color System” and have been the Swedish standard for color designations since 1979.
In short, it is a way of describing any color based on hue, colorfulness, whiteness and blackness. The system is based entirely on how we humans SEE color. We choose color by appearance and NCS provides an unambiguous description of the experience of a surface color. It says nothing about materials, pigments or solvents, but they are completely even and smooth and are available in silk-matt gloss or high-gloss finish. Paint is also experienced with the materials it is painted on, so a smooth surface gives a brighter color experience, while a rough, textured surface forms small shadows, giving the color a certain dullness.
A matt, smooth surface gives a more even and unambiguous color experience than one that is brightly painted, as it reflects the light and thus becomes more varied and lively. The difference is when you talk about the color’s OWN COLOR (ie the color that a painted surface actually has) versus EXPERIENCED COLOR (which is used to describe the color of the surface depending on the material, light and distance used). This can be summarized as the EXPERIENCE of NCS.
Now let’s move on to the NCS SYSTEM and how it is structured.
First, let’s go through the six elementary colours on which the system is based, and these are colours that we humans perceive as “pure colours”, the basis for humans to characterize different colours. The first four colored elementary colors are YELLOW (Y as in yellow), RED (R as in red), BLUE (B as in blue) and GREEN (G as in green). The two non-colored colors are WHITE (W as in white) and BLACK (S as in blackness).
All other colors except the six elementary colors are described based on “greater or lesser similarity to these six”. And based on different degrees of similarity, all colors can be described in relation to each other in a three-dimensional model called NCS COLOR GRAYMD.
In simple terms, this means that the four colors are positioned like the cardinal points of a compass and each quadrant of the circle (4) is divided into 100 equal steps to indicate the exact tone of the color. The designation of the exact color is based on two letters which in turn are
derived from the color characteristics Y, B, R and G and followed by a number indicating the size ratio to the original color. (For example, B80G is green with 80% greenness and the remaining is 20% blue).
The human brain can only handle a maximum of 2 colored elementary properties at the same time, so with the above example, the color tone between blue and green is turquoise. The system is based on two colors at a time. A color between blue and green cannot contain red or yellow. In the system,
there should also be added a grey color that has no hue and is symbolized by N (as in NEUTRAL).
The next step in the system is the COLOR TRIANGLE which gives each hue in different shades, a so-called “color family”. The triangle is based on only ONE HUE (C), the maximum chromaticity and its different shades in relation to the elementary colors WHITE and BLACK. The scales for white, black and
chromaticity are also divided into hundredths (percentages). When studying the hue designation, it is first the blackness that is shown with two digits, then the chromaticity with two digits and the whiteness is then indirectly the sum between these two that is taken from 100%. If we use the numbers 6030 as an example, it means 60% blackness, 30% colorfulness and then there remains 10% of whiteness = 100% in total.
An example could look like this:
S 2050 B30G 70 blue+30 green= turquoise
S (Standard) stands since 1995 for the world leading complete color and shade designation. According to EU environmental requirements, only environmentally approved pigments are used in the production of the color samples and they are coated with real paint to be more durable.
