About ChromaChecker

20+ years building
the universal color platform.

Founded in 2013 by industry veterans, ChromaChecker was born from one realization: every printer, every brand, every supplier needed a common language for color quality — measurable, verifiable, and shared in real time.

Talk to Us Meet the Founder

Trusted by color experts worldwide

Origin

From desktop publishing to global color quality.

90s

The Aldus & Adobe years

Our story begins at Aldus Corporation, helping Fortune 500 companies adopt desktop publishing and digital color at scale. After Adobe's acquisition of Aldus, the focus shifted toward solving the practical color problems that printers and brands faced every day.

2013

ChromaChecker is founded

David Hunter co-founds ChromaChecker Corporation, turning two decades of industry knowledge into the first universal color quality platform. The mission: a single shared system for measuring, analyzing, and certifying color across every device, process, and supplier.

Today

Universal color platform

ChromaChecker serves printers, brand owners, and color manufacturers globally — synchronizing color standards in real time across multi-site supply chains. Color management, transformed into a strategic business advantage.

Core Values

What we believe.

01

Customer Expectations Matter

Visual approval is person-dependent, lighting-dependent, and non-transferable. Customer expectations only become a real standard when expressed as spectral data and ΔE tolerances — numbers every supplier can verify independently, every time.

02

Measure What Matters

The eye misses metamerism, instrument drift, and substrate shifts. Instruments don’t. Every ChromaChecker decision traces to a measurement — never an impression.

03

Predictable Beats Reactive

Visual inspection finds problems after they ship — if at all. Instrument-based control flags press drift, instrument correlation failures, and process shifts before a single sheet is wasted.

04

Protect the Brand

A physical swatch ages, fades, and fails under different light. A spectral definition in CxF doesn’t. Brand color must be defined at the spectral level — lighting-independent, metamerism-controlled, verifiable at any supplier worldwide.

05

Never Stop Improving

Color maturity has five levels. Most operations run at Level 1 or 2. Each step up means more precision, fewer rejections, and real competitive advantage. ChromaChecker is built to move you up that ladder.

Color maturity has five levels — from visual judgment to full spectral control. Where does your workflow stand?

Explore the 5 maturity levels →

Leadership

Founded by industry veterans.

ChromaChecker is the work of people who have spent their careers solving real color problems for real printers and real brands — long before "color quality at scale" was an industry term.

CEO & Co-Founder

David Hunter

30+ years of expertise in print process improvement and color management within the graphic arts and printing industries. David's career spans Aldus Corporation, Adobe-era color solutions, and a series of ventures dedicated to giving printers and brands the process control they actually need on the shop floor.

Vision

Color as a measurable, shareable language

"Color quality should not be subjective. It should be measurable, verifiable, and shared in real time across every plant in your supply chain." That conviction shaped ChromaChecker from day one — and it's still the principle that drives every feature we build.

Today

Speaking, teaching, advancing the field

David continues to present at major industry events on color quality advancement, and contributes to standards work, educational programs, and the broader print-color community.

Industry Contributions

Building the color community.

1999

GATF/PIA Color Conference

Co-founded the GATF/PIA Color Conference in 1999 — a long-running industry forum that brought together printers, technology vendors, and color scientists to share practical knowledge about real-world color management.

National Initiative

Apple ColorSync Initiative

Supported Apple's national ColorSync initiative — bringing system-level color management out of the lab and into the hands of designers, printers, and creative professionals across the country.

Flagship Innovation

E-Factor® methodology

Developed the E-Factor® — a quantifiable method for defining and monitoring color expectations. It has become fundamental to how major printers and manufacturers synchronize devices, processes, and standards across an entire run.

Ongoing

Speaking & education

Active presence at major industry events, sharing current thinking on color quality advancement, supply-chain QC, and the role of measurement in modern packaging and print workflows.

Customer Voices

Real outcomes from real production environments.

Quoted in full from print manufacturers, packaging converters, and color experts running ChromaChecker every day.

“

ChromaChecker paid for itself in the first two weeks. The first three color problems it solved weren't even print-related — instrument correlation, humidity drift, and viewing-booth mismatch.

James Hillman
President of Mossberg
“

ChromaChecker is not just a tool for color-matching; it is a robust system for quality assurance and brand protection — guaranteeing that a brand's color integrity is protected with every single impression.

Color Quality Lead
National Print Services Network
“

ChromaChecker provides a complete manufacturing framework that has helped our company transition from a Graphic Arts printer to a Print Manufacturer. This is unlike any other solution.

Coburn Carton Solutions
Folding carton packaging · 50 years
Read all customer stories
Flagship Innovation

The metric that defined
modern print QC.

The E-Factor® is ChromaChecker's signature contribution to the industry — a quantifiable method for defining and monitoring color expectations. It evaluates an entire press run, not just a single patch, and uses the 95th percentile of ΔE 00 across thousands of color points to give one robust verdict per job. Today it is fundamental to how major printers and brand owners synchronize devices, processes, and standards.

1.9 Approved
5.6 Rejected
º
E-Factor ≤ your tolerance → Spec met. Job approved. 95% of measured colors fall within the tolerance you defined for this brand color set.
²
E-Factor > your tolerance → Out of spec. Reject. Run does not meet the brand standard — the lot must be reprinted before approval.
Try the E-Factor exercise
Supplier Report · Job #4821 ● APPROVED
Brand color conformance · ΔE 00
CS — Brand Red
0.84
CS — Brand Blue
0.91
CS — Logo Gold
1.08
CMYK — Average
0.73
Substrate
0.62
E-Factor (95th pct.)
1.9
Brand tolerance
2.00
✓ Approved
Case study · $1M customer loss
Two presses passed. The customer still rejected the job.
Both plants were G7-compliant. Both systems showed green. E-Factor explained the rejection in 15 minutes — because it measures what the buyer actually sees.
Read the full story

Today

What we do now.

ChromaChecker enables organizations globally to monitor, measure, and optimize color performance in real time — across every plant, every supplier, every continent. We turn color management from a craft skill into a measurable, shareable language: a strategic business advantage rather than a recurring source of waste, rework, and disputes.

Real-time, multi-site color monitoring
Cloud-native — synchronized everywhere
Color quality as strategic advantage

Used by printers, packaging manufacturers, brand owners, and color experts in production environments worldwide.

Want to talk about color quality?

We're always happy to share what we know — and learn what your team is up against.

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