How paint colour matching works between brands

You find a colour you like on a card from one shop, and the shop near you stocks a different brand. The names are no help at all. Every brand invents its own, and two paints called Soft Grey from two brands can look nothing alike on a wall.

So the site has a page for every pair of brands in the catalogue. It takes a cross-section of one brand's range and sets each colour beside the closest thing to it in the other brand. If you want to know what a Farrow & Ball colour looks like in Dulux, or what the Colourtrend equivalent of a Fleetwood shade is, that is the page.

Colours are matched as colours, not as names

Every paint in the catalogue is stored as a measured colour, not just a name and a code. To find a match we convert both paints into Lab, which is a way of describing colour that is closer to how the eye sees it than a hex code is, and then measure the distance between them using CIEDE2000.

That distance is the number under each pair. Nothing about the name, the range, the code on the tin, or the price goes into it. Two paints that measure close are close.

What the three labels mean

A small number means the two paints are hard to tell apart. A bigger one means you would notice the difference on a wall.

Excellent match is under 1.5. Side by side on the same wall, in the same light, most people would not pick out the join.

Good match is under 3.5. Close enough to swap in, with a difference you could find if you went looking for it.

Close alternative is anything above that. It is the nearest that brand has, and it is worth seeing, but it is a different colour and we would rather say so.

Both directions are separate pages

Farrow & Ball to Dulux and Dulux to Farrow & Ball are not the same question, and the pages do not agree with each other.

The reason is simple. Start with a Farrow & Ball colour, find its nearest Dulux, then ask what that Dulux colour's nearest Farrow & Ball is, and you often land somewhere else. A big range like Dulux or Johnstone's has something near almost anything, so it matches a smaller range well. Going the other way, a smaller range has gaps, and some colours come back as close alternatives rather than good matches.

So the counts along the top of each page are worth reading before the swatches. They tell you how well one range actually covers the other, in that direction.

The pairs have no line between them

Each pair is one block of colour, with the two paints butted straight against each other and no border, no gap and no gradient. A border is a lie in a colour comparison. It gives your eye an edge to hold on to, and two colours that would blend into one look like two.

If you cannot find the join, that is your match. Move your pointer across a block to give one side or the other more of the space.

What a match cannot tell you

It cannot tell you about finish. Matt, eggshell and gloss made to the same colour read differently on a wall, and gloss will look darker and stronger. It cannot account for your room either. North facing light pulls colours cooler, a warm bulb pushes them the other way, and a big wall always reads stronger than a card.

Screens are the other problem. Yours is not calibrated, ours is not either, and neither of them is your hallway at four o'clock in November.

So use the match to shorten the list, then buy a sample pot of the two or three that survive and paint them on the wall you actually care about.

Where to find them

Every brand page links to its comparisons, and every paint page carries its own version of this: the closest colour to that one paint in every other brand we hold, measured the same way.

If you want to start somewhere, try Farrow & Ball to Dulux, Dulux to Colourtrend or Colourtrend to Fleetwood.