We are picking a new house color and so I am looking at various tints online then printing them on a color laser. The screen version of course looks vary different than the printed version. My question is how close the actual house paint will look to the printed color?
We had our house painted recently, and the guy who did the job had a color wheel of swatches. We stood out in the yard, picked colors from that, and it came out just so.
It’s hard to say that you could trust what came out of your printer.
Not knowing anything about your monitor, computer, printer and drivers setup, it’s very hard to say. Based on modern LCD monitor technology vs printer tech, I’d guess that what you see on screen is far closer than what the printer delivers. Leaving out the effects of the gloss level of the paint. The only accurate reference for a non-pro setup is the manufacturer’s physical paint chips.
With printers, it’s down to luck. So many variables here. Thinks like whether or not the printer has ever been calibrated, whether the driver is correctly trying to compensate for the type of paper involved, whether the driver is altering the colors to make a more ‘pleasing’ print, whether the colorspace of the file sent to the printer has been preserved and any ICC profiles have been correctly handled. And so on, and so on.
I’m surprised. Because of the two completely different methods of producing color I had always heard that printed color is much closer than monitor color.
I wouldn’t trust either home printer or monitor. Something like this is important enough to me to take the trip to the paint store and use their paint samples to choose.
If you still can’t decide, some paint stores offer the choice to buy very small cans of any color you’re interested in, so you can actually paint it on the house to see how it looks in situ.
Since I have the he code, can I go into a Sherwin Williams and have them match the code to their closest color and get a swatch?
Without a calibrated monitor or printer, the results from either the monitor or printer are going to be questionable at best.
And of course the color will vary, depending on the lighting, time of day and other factors. So actually putting paint on the wall is a good idea.
If you’re going to a paint store, why not just get all their color cards and pick the one you want? Why are you trying to “match” a color you found online when you don’t know what true color it is?
Very little, I imagine. Too many variables.
The best way I’ve ever found to get the right color on my house is to find a large building or wall that sports the exact color I want, then match that color to a swatch. You’ll likely be surprised at how different the swatch color is to the large expanse of building.
Because that is information overload. My idea was to settle on a base color we both agree to and then from there look at the variations.
Information overload? I don’t understand. Your approach seems to involve making this process far more complicated than it needs to be.
You’ve never shopped for paint with Mrs Cad. It’s like a squirrel in a nut factory.
If you’re using a 4-color inkjet with CMYK cartridges there’s little hope that the printed colors will be useful. If you’re using a recently calibrated monitor and a 9-color inkjet, there’s a slightly greater chance.
Even if you’re using color samples from the paint supplier, you should test paint a big area on the house before ordering the full batch. Colors can look dramatically different on east wall vs north wall vs south etc. If you’re in a typical one-color room, every plane will be a very different tone — and won’t look like what you see on a monitor or in the paint store.
Sure, if the printer is using a wide-gamut ink set, is profiled and calibrated and printing on an appropriate base (not commodity uncoated paper) it can be a very accurate representation of a paint swatch. Lots of ifs in there not commonly met by typical home and office printers. When’s the last time you busted out your spectrophotometer and took readings off an IT8 target you printed? What’s your computed delta E color accuracy? Only dorks like me and/or color pros do all this.
On the flip side, monitors are getting better and better these days and much more likely to adhere to their target values assuming the user didn’t monkey with the controls. Yes, the gamut a monitor can reproduce is less than what the physical world contains, but most people aren’t choosing heavily saturated, wild colors that would be out of gamut for the monitor. If you’re painting your house day-glo orange or a sparkly electric blue, you’re out of luck. Different beiges, grays, muted browns and greens? You’re probably covered.
So I took Riemann’s advice once I found out I could order swatches from Sherwin Williams. I ordered 5 around the color we had agreed to before (don’t ask) and then 5 others and from there we will explore the options close to the swatch we decide on.
It’s not even so much an issue of calibration, but completely different methods for laying down the color. Paint is pigment-based so it covers its substrate completely, whether white or black or anything in between. Any printed color, except perhaps pure black, is going to be dependent on the paper that’s being used. So light colors like beige can be very difficult to reproduce on a printer because the bright white base just isn’t there. Also there’s plenty of colors that simply can’t be produced with a CMYK process, whether inkjet or laser. Bright DayGlo colors (think construction sign orange or electric green) simply aren’t possible to get out of a printer, but with paint pigments they’re no problem.
Hence why I learned monitors = additive = not accurate; printers (especially laser) = subtractive = accurate. I didn’t realize that they were still inaccurate (unless a Pantone printer I guess).
A printer would be more accurate than a monitor, and in this case a laser printer would be more accurate than an inkjet, but that could just mean going from 75% accurate to 80% accurate which in the case of paint matching would be garbage.
At my last job the company rebranded and the new business cards and bespoke printed items, wall paint, etc. used a very vibrant orange that is simply impossible to reproduce in a CMYK process. You get a duller red/orange even when using the Pantone color and properly calibrated devices.
I disagree. A reference-grade monitor properly calibrated and profiled, viewed in a controlled lighting environment will be more accurate than pretty much any home use inkjet or laser printer not given the same care in configuration and not using a custom, color-managed RIP.
Similarly, a good laser printer can be more accurate that a semi-disposable inkjet, but it’s no accident that all of the commercial color proofing systems I’ve encountered are inkjets, some with up to 12 different colors of ink. No laser printer can boast that broad of a matchable color gamut, being limited to CMYK toner only.