Abstract Color image difference metrics have been proposed to find differences between an original image and a reproduction. One of these metrics is the hue angle algorithm proposed by Hong and Luo in 2002. This metric does not take into account the spatial properties of the human visual system, and it could therefore miscalculate the differences between the original and the reproduction. In this article we propose a new color image difference metric based on the hue angle algorithm that takes into account the spatial properties of the human visual system. The proposed metric, the Spatial Hue Angle Metric, has been subjected to extensive testing. The results show improvement in performance compared to the original metric proposed by Hong and Luo, and improvement over or similar performance to traditional metrics, such as the Structural Similarity Metric and Spatial-CIELAB.