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Abstract We investigate the effects of keeping the full color structure for parton emissions in parton showers for both LEP and LHC. This is done within the Herwig 7 dipole shower, and includes gluon emission, gluon splitting, initial state branching processes, as well as hadronization. The subleading N c terms are included as color matrix element corrections to the splitting kernels by evolving an amplitude-level density operator and correcting the radiation pattern for each parton multiplicity, up to a fixed number of full color emissions, after which a standard leading color shower takes over. Our results are compared to data for a wide range of LEP and LHC observables and show that the subleading N c corrections tend to be small for most observables probing hard, perturbative dynamics, for both LEP and LHC. However, for some of these observables they exceed 10%. On soft physics we find signs of significantly larger effects.