Our previous study compared the effectiveness of Clemson color clustering (CCC) shade sorting, originating at Clemson University, with a shade sorting process called K-means, originating at the Indian Institute of Technology. We proved that these two methods were suitable for shade sorting since their performance was very much alike. These results have led to a study of modifications of the CCC shade sorting process by combining hierarchical and nonhierarchical algorithms into a single process in order to improve the effectiveness of shade sorting.