For dyeing masters and textile units
Photograph the cloth.
Read the color.
Mix the dye.
Shadecard measures fabric color with your phone camera and returns a trichromatic recipe — yellow, red, blue, and the depth to dye at. Every answer carries its own error bar, and the app tells you when it cannot measure honestly.
The measurement
Four steps, in this order, every time.
The order matters — each step depends on the one before it holding still.
Lock
Meter once on the fabric, then lock exposure and white balance for all three frames. An unlocked camera re-decides the color between shots.
Measure
A trimmed mean across the whole region, not one pixel — fabric color is a spatial average. Then sRGB to CIELAB, corrected against the grey card.
Match
Nearest shade by ΔE2000 weighted 2:1 on lightness, the textile convention — because depth is your dial and hue is the library's.
Mix
The shade's yellow:red:blue ratio, a depth band read off measured L*, and the dye class for your fiber. Then you run the lab dip.
Refusals
A tool you can trust is one that declines.
Three conditions stop Shadecard from giving you a recipe. It names the one that failed instead of guessing.
Shade family only
Without a white or grey card in frame there is nothing to correct the light against. You get the family, never a recipe.
Capture rejected
If the three shots disagree by more than ΔE 3, the reading is not stable enough to act on. You are told which guard failed and asked to shoot again.
No recipe offered
If the nearest shade in the library is further than ΔE 9, a ratio copied from it would mislead you. You get family hints and nothing more.
A phone is not a spectrophotometer. Every recipe here is a starting point that ends at a lab dip.
The library
13297 shades, gated so none of them are decorative.
Every shade carries a yellow:red:blue ratio and a typical depth. Automated gates keep near-duplicates out and prove there is no uncovered hole in the region real garments actually live in.
Language
Every word, in both languages.
Not just the buttons — the warnings, the refusal messages and the dyeing terms are all written in Urdu too, because that is the language the work is actually discussed in.