All About Colour Accuracy and Inconsistencies

We've all seen it. You look at a paint online and think "that's just the colour I'm looking for" and hit buy now. Then when the paint arrives it's totally different to the website! Some are better than others, but sadly there's no sure-fire way to accurately represent a paint online - so you can forgive paint manufacturers that at least!

In this article I'll discuss some reasons for these inconsistencies, and what I'm trying to do with MiniPainters to give you the best information possible when making a decision. I'm not there yet, but I hope you come along for the ride.

Colours in print

When colours are printed traditionally, they use a system called CMYK which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. To create colours on a page, a mixture of these 4 inks is used. This gives a relatively large range of colours that are possible to be printed which has served the printing industry's needs, but it does have it's limits.

Colours on computer screens

By contrast, colours on computer screens use a system called RGB which stands for Red, Green and Blue. Computer screens use a mixture of these 3 colours to create colours on a computer screen. Again, this gives a wide range of colours that are possible to create which is more than suitable to showing images and videos on a screen, but much like CMYK it has it's limits.

On top of this, computer screen setting change from device to device, so there's no guarantee that the colour I see is the same as the colour you're seeing - what a nightmare!

Source: Mixam

Accuracy

These limitations make it difficult to accurately represent the nuances of paint colours. On top of this, how the colour was sampled by the manufacturer in the first place also comes into play (do they take a colour reading when the paint is wet or dry for example).

On top of all of this, when paint is mass produced there may sometimes be very subtle differences between batches, despite a manufacturers best efforts and quality control. It's all very complex with many moving parts as I'm sure you can understand!

The problem

So, when I'm trying to create the biggest and best resource of paint online, this poses quite a problem. I can't possibly display an accurate colour swatch for every paint, so I just have to accept that.

Instead what I've chosen to do is implement a 3 swatch system to give you as much information as possible when making a decision.

The three MiniPainters colour swatches

Manufacturer Swatch The first is manufacturer swatches. I've spoken about this more here, but essentially this is the colour provided by the manufacturer.
MiniPainters Swatch The second is MiniPainters' own swatch. This is a work in progress, but as I populate the database I'm taking my own swatches directly from the paint pot. You can find more information about this here, but in my experience despite the limitations I've mentioned above, these are a much better representation of the paints themselves.
Painted Swatch The final piece to the puzzle (and one for the future) is painted samples. Each paint is painted onto a sample plate over a neutral grey primer until it is fully opaque, and then professionally photographed. This will give a real life example of the painted, dry paint.