Ever wonder what color matches Games Workshop’s Dark Angels Green in Folk Art Paints? Maybe you want to do a mini up based on a picture from a favorite artist and you want to get the colors just right. Look no further.

Color Match 1.0 is a free tool which indexes and matches paints from over 30 popular paint lines and allows you to compare them to any other line. In addition to matching paints, you can enter in RGB information which you can get from art or photographs in order to find the right paint color for what you are doing.

And thats not all - need to get a list of paints that match from one company to another, the Full Line tool allows you to do just that.

Basically what it does is compare colors within a 3 dimensional color space to determine what will be the closest match in terms of hue, saturation and lightness. This is a much more reliable way of matching than simply using RGB values, since relatively close RGB values can look very different - and some which are pretty far apart can look pretty close.

According to the science behind the math, anything closer than 2 units will be indistinguishable by the naked eye. However since we are not all the same, this will vary somewhat from person to person (I can barely tell the difference between certain colors as far as 10 units apart due to retinal damage back in my welding days). Normally when I am looking for a color to match, I will set the limit at 6 initially and tweak the numbers from there. Remember though, this is art more than anything else - so if a color does not look right, go with your gut. This should save a good bit of time though.

Since I published the initial version I have received a number of questions regarding the source of my colors and color information. I have added a section in the website's FAQ to cover this information, however if there is anything there which hasn't been covered feel free to contact me.