Color structure for soft gluon resummation — a general recipe

A strategy for calculating the color structure needed for soft gluon resummation for processes with any number of colored partons is introduced using a N_c → ∞ inspired basis. In this basis a general formalism can be found at the same time as the calculations are simplified. The advantages are illustrated by recalculating the soft anomalous dimension matrix for the processes gg → gg, qbar q → qbar qg and qbar q → ggg.