The smartphone camera is a great tool for capturing photos of things you like. It could be as direct as photos of friends, family, animals, landscapes, but it could also be photos of things that inspire you. Pantone’s latest product wants to extend your smartphone’s ability to capture items of inspiration by allowing it to turn into a real-life eye-dropper tool that can pick and identify colors with incredible, Pantone-backed accuracy!

Meet the Color Match Card… an innocuous-looking card with a grid of colored swatches and a hollow cutout in the middle. All you do is place the card on an object who’s color you want to scan and point your camera at it. The Pantone Connect app does the rest, automatically analyzing the color within the hollow cutout and giving you matching Pantone color values that you can either document or save within the Pantone Connect app or even send directly to a palette that you can access using Adobe’s suite of creative tools. The tech behind the Color Match card is pretty simple. The colorful swatches (and the tracking markers around it) help the Pantone app calibrate the way it captures colors, allowing you to accurately grab hues in all sorts of lighting conditions with great accuracy. The color swatches help the Pantone app understand what sort of lighting (warm, cool, or neutral) you’re in and white-balance the image on its own as a calibration measure. The app then scans the hue within the cutout at the center of the card, matching it with Pantone’s vast color library to give you a list of Pantone values you can easily use for your next project!

Designer: Pantone