Reaperites! I give you: My Colour Comparator Spreadsheet!

[Wren]

I tested eight of the colours. I did full strength swatches, doing a second coat where necessary for decent coverage. I also did a thinned swipe of paint, since often you can see a colour a little differently when it is thinned. I would say two are close enough to act as pretty good substitutes for each other. A third is pretty close at full strength, and only slightly different thinned. Six of the eight are pretty close matches for tone (how dark versus light), even if they aren't great for hue, but I don't know how useful that is. I guess it depends on what someone uses the matching tool for. If you're looking to replace a colour that you've used on an army, you'll want a pretty close match. If you have a small selection of paint in one brand and would like to try not to buy something to similar when making purchases from another brand, then it's probably more useful. (At least you won't end up with two mid blues sort of thing.)

 

On my swatches, the first colour is the Reaper Master Series you listed, the second colour is the P3 match you listed. Any third or fourth colours are my attempt to match the P3. I definitely didn't do any better on the blues than the math. ;-> I had a quick look at Frostbite versus Ghost White. Ghost White is paler, it's not far off from white. I didn't spot a closer visual match to Frostbite in the Master Series line, however.

 

I don't have an easy way to upload to a web page at the moment, so I just stuck them on Facebook, hopefully that's not a problem. (They should be set for public viewing.)

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151855230009407&set=a.58272409406.63738.720104406&type=3&theater

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151855230534407&set=a.58272409406.63738.720104406&type=1&theater

[unidentifiable]

Whelp, that was fun while it lasted.

 

Thanks for the physical comparison Wren. Disappointing results. The reds turned out pretty close, and the deep green wasn't bad. The off-green and blues were terrible matches, which is disappointing. I would have thought the Lemon Yellow would have been more opaque, especially considering how vivid it looks on the website. Maybe Reaper should switch to displaying their paints over a checkered 'transparency' background? (Like photoshop).

 

I'll have more time tomorrow, and I know you just snapped a quicky picture, but I'm interested in what RGB those actually are versus what Reaper/PP claim them to be. Maybe there's some constant delta that I can apply as a correction.

 

Interesting tidbit: I found a site with the old Reaper Pro paint swatches. Used them, and compared to the HD line, which shares a lot of the same names with the old Pro paints. In 80% of cases, the colours with the same names came back as nearly exact matches. So either Reaper just copied & pasted their old Pro swatch colours to use for the HD swatches, or there's actually some form of consistency in their paint-to-web conversion. But whatever consistency exists, doesn't translate back from web-to-paint apparently.

 

Lesson learned: Art + Math == Haha fat chance.

 

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Crazy Idea #2: Open source comparison chart. I'll clear my Google Doc but leave the headers (or maybe make calculated matches have different text) and then open it for everyone to edit. Then, if you notice a gap in the chart, you try your best to match it, and fill it in. Unfortunately this requires access to the entire paint lines you're comparing.

[cthulhudarren]

How the heck do you compare two colors programmatically?

[unidentifiable]

How the heck do you compare two colors programmatically?

 

I linked the equation in the very first post. Then I explained everything.

[Doug Sundseth]

Best bet would be to photograph painted swatches on white, gray, and black along with a calibrated gray card. Oh, Reaperpeeps ....

 

(I don't think this will happen soon. And I doubt that it will even happen Soon™. )

[Wren]

I forgot to mention that when I posted - I scanned my swatches on our scanner, I didn't use a camera or colour correct them as I would with a camera. I might be able to take pictures of them in the next week or two as I'll likely need to set everything up to take pictures of minis. Also they're just painted on index cards, not a specific colour of white paper or anything.

 

I'm pretty sure that any Pro Paint that reappeared as an HD paint of the same name is the same colour, or very close to. Those colours reappear because they're popular, useful colours. I love Woodland Brown, for example. Also Ashen Brown in HD is the same colour as the original Ashen Brown that was in regular MSP. (Its triad was canceled, though Volcano Brown also came back in one of the Old Favourites triads.) The base formulation of Pro Paints versus HD is a little different, and maybe it's possible that could affect how the colour looks very slightly. Reaper's been pretty good about having a name = that specific colour regardless of formulation.

 

Lemon Yellow is an opaque paint. It's just a very pale pastel yellow. I'm not sure if it's exactly the same as Vallejo Model Ice Yellow, but I think it's close. I suspect the swatch was made a little darker/more vivid to be visible on a page, and the necessity of doing that is one reason that I questioned the assumption that the swatches were exact analogs of the physical paint colours. If you look at the metallic swatches, they're clearly representational of shininess and approximate colours.

[CashWiley]

I love this thread.