About this site, and where the data comes from

What it does

It answers one question: you own a pot of paint, the recipe calls for a different range, what is the closest thing you can actually buy. 9327 paints across 29 ranges are compared to each other and the nearest match is published for every one of them.

How the matching works

Each paint's sRGB value is converted to CIELAB under a D65 white point, then compared with CIEDE2000 (CIE 142:2001) — the current standard colour-difference formula. The implementation is verified against the 34-pair acceptance set from Sharma, Wu & Dalal (2005), which exists precisely to catch implementations that get the hue-band and rotation terms wrong.

This matters because the obvious alternative — comparing RGB numbers directly — does not match human vision. Two greens that differ by the same RGB distance as two blues do not look equally different. CIEDE2000 corrects for that.

What it cannot tell you

A hex value describes a colour on a screen. A pot of paint also has pigment load, opacity, finish and behaviour under a wash, none of which survive the trip to six hex digits. Two paints that match at ΔE 0.8 can still behave differently on the model. Treat every match here as a shortlist to test, not a guarantee.

The colour values are community-sampled approximations rather than vendor-published specifications. They are good enough to rank candidates and not good enough to reproduce a colour exactly.

Data attribution

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Ranges whose colour data came from sources that did not grant redistribution are deliberately excluded from this site, as are harvested barcode and price records. Colour standards such as RAL and Pantone are excluded too: they are reference systems, not paints you can buy.

Brand names and paint names are trademarks of their respective owners. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any paint manufacturer.

Corrections and contact

A wrong colour value here becomes a wrong recommendation on every page that paint appears on, so corrections are worth more than compliments. If a match looks wrong, a paint is missing, or a range has been renamed, open an issue at github.com/PauloSalum/paint-equivalents/issues — that is the contact route for this site, and it is the same place the generator that builds these pages lives, so a report and its fix stay together.

Include the paint name, the range, and what you expected. If the value came from the upstream dataset the fix belongs there and will be passed on.