CIEDE2000 Delta-E calculator
Perceptual color difference between two colors, computed with CIEDE2000 — the canonical formula from the International Commission on Illumination.
CIEDE2000 ΔE18.36
Different colors that share a general region.
What is CIEDE2000?
CIEDE2000 is a perceptual color difference formula published by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in 2001. Unlike naive RGB distance, it accounts for the human eye's varying sensitivity to different hues, lightness levels, and saturation. A ΔE near 0 means two colors look identical; ΔE around 2 is the threshold of just-noticeable difference for a trained observer.
Implementation follows Sharma, Wu, & Dalal (2005). Read more about how Close Hue uses ΔE to score guesses on the scoring page.
Common ΔE thresholds
| ΔE range | Description |
|---|---|
| < 1 | Imperceptible |
| 1–2 | Just-noticeable difference |
| 2–10 | Visible but close |
| 10–50 | Clearly different |
| > 50 | Effectively unrelated |