Most of the colour-difference formulae were developed to fit data sets having a limited range of colour-difference magnitudes. Hence, their performances are uncertain when applying them to a range of colour differences from very small to very large colour differences. This article describes an experiment including three parts according to the colour-difference magnitudes: large colour difference (LCD), small colour difference (SCD), and threshold colour difference (TCD) corresponding to mean ?E?ab* values of 50.3, 3.5, and 0.6, respectively. Three visual assessment techniques were used: ratio judgement, pair comparison, and threshold for LCD, SCD, and TCD experiments, respectively. Three data sets were used to test six colour-difference formulae and uniform colour spaces (CIELAB, CIE94, CIEDE2000, CAM02-SCD, CAM02-UCS, and CAM02-LCD). The results showed that all formulae predicted visual results with great accuracy except CIELAB. CIEDE2000 worked effectively for the full range of colour differences, i.e., it performed the best for the TCD and SCD data and reasonably well for the LCD data. The three CIECAM02 based colour spaces gave quite satisfactory performance. (c) Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2012