Paste a hex value or an RGB triplet, or pick a colour, and get the nearest DMC stranded cottons, sorted by how different they look to an eye. Each one has a reference to buy and a page of its own.
The plain-cotton DMC range is a fixed set of shades: you cannot mix a colour, only find the nearest one that already exists. This searches the whole range, using the same measure the converter uses to choose the thread for a stitch.
Five values worth having an answer to, run through exactly what runs when you type one.
Screen colours are a guide, not a match. Use the top few as a shortlist and settle it against a real shade card.
Your colour and all 483 threads are converted from RGB into CIELAB, a space built so that the distance between two colours is roughly what an eye reports rather than what the numbers say. The threads are then sorted by CIEDE2000, the CIE's own refinement of that distance, which corrects for Lab still overstating differences between saturated colours and understating them between blues. Why it matters: plain RGB distance calls two dark greens similar because their numbers are small, separates two pale pinks because theirs are large, and answers a deep red with a thread the right distance away in the wrong hue. Every match on this page, and every thread in every chart this site produces, is chosen the same way.
ΔE is the distance, and it has a scale worth knowing. Under 1, two colours side by side are indistinguishable: for any practical purpose it is the same colour. Between 1 and 2 you can see it if you hold the samples together in daylight and go looking. Between 2 and 5 it is a difference you would mention without being asked. Above 5 it is another colour, and if the first result is up there the range simply has nothing nearer: DMC's greens and blues are dense, its violets and its true oranges are sparse, and that shows here rather than being hidden by a percentage.
Three common cases, and they are not equally trustworthy. A hex value out of a design file or a brand guideline is exact, and the match is as good as this gets. A colour picked out of a photograph is the colour of a photograph: the lighting, the white balance and the compression are all in it, and a red jumper photographed indoors is a different number from the same jumper outdoors. Sample a flat, well-lit part of it rather than an edge or a highlight. A colour read off a screen showing somebody else's chart is two screens' worth of guesswork: use it to reach the right family, then judge the shortlist on a card.
This is the caveat that matters, and no converter can remove it. A monitor emits light; a skein reflects it. Cotton has a sheen that changes with the angle you hold it at, six strands look different from two, and dye lots vary enough that DMC prints a lot number on the band. On top of that, the hex values behind this page are the published chart's approximations of dyed thread rather than measurements of it. So take the list as three or four shades to go and look at, not as an answer. Every shop worth buying from keeps a real colour card, and a card held against the fabric settles in two seconds what no amount of arithmetic can.
The same sum answers the question people ask more often: a chart calls for a number the shop does not stock. Open that reference's own page, which every shade in the range has, and the eight nearest are already listed, computed exactly this way. If what you have is the skein and no reference at all, matching its colour here is the way back to a number; hold it in daylight, against something white, and expect to be choosing between two or three rather than landing on one.
That is every plain stranded-cotton shade DMC prints, minus a handful the chart gives two numbers to: Blanc and White are one skein spelled twice. The metallic, satin, Étoile and neon ranges are left out deliberately. They share their numbers and their published colours with plain cotton, so a black would come back as E310 as readily as 310, and somebody would buy metallic thread for a shadow. They are beautiful, and they are a different product.
Six characters after a hash, like #1B4D3E, giving the red, green and blue parts of a colour as pairs of hexadecimal digits from 00 to FF. It is what design tools, websites and colour pickers all speak. The three-digit short form, #1B4, is the same thing with each digit doubled, and this field takes it.
Yes. Every thread's own page prints its hex and its RGB triplet, and the full chart lists them together. That direction is exact in the sense that it is what the published chart says. It is still a screen's approximation of dyed cotton.
Usually because the range genuinely has nothing closer, and second most often because the colour was sampled from a shadow or a highlight rather than from the body of the subject. Check the ΔE: past about 5 the tool is telling you that the nearest DMC thread really is a different colour.
No. It matches against DMC stranded cotton only, because that is the range this site holds and the one its converter buys from. Conversion tables between brands exist, and they are approximate for exactly the reasons this page gives.
That is the converter. It reduces a photograph to a grid of stitches, assigns every one of them a DMC thread by this same measure, and hands back a printable chart with the references and a stitch count for each. This page is that machinery with a single colour in it.