As color is an important attribute of foods, the need for its control is self evident. This latter is normally accomplished by the classical methods such as colorimetry and spectrophotometry that both operate in either reflection or transmission mode. In this work, a first of that kind, an entirely different approach is being proposed – the information about the color is derived from the absorbance measurement. The newly proposed methods used here are the optothermal window (OW) and the optothermistor (OT); both belong to the class of the so called photothermal (PT) techniques. Basic idea behind the experiment is to explore the anticipated correlation between the amount of specific colorant and the magnitude of the OW and OT signals. Various tomato-based products were used as test samples; all of them contain lycopene (red pigment) as a dominant colorant. The outcomes of OW and OT measurements were correlated with colorimetric indices L*, a*, b*, C* as well as with derived quantity tomato paste index (TPI) obtained from the same samples.