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Walked into an old hardware store in Portland and their paint chips were faded
I was picking up supplies for a job in the Pearl District last week and stopped by this family run hardware spot. Their whole color rack was sitting right in a south facing window and every single chip had that yellowed, sunbleached look. It got me thinking about how my own digital palettes age too when I keep them in the same project file for months without checking them under different light. Has anyone else ran into problems using old reference colors that don't match what you originally picked?
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jordangibson9d agoTop Commenter
Yeah, light kills paint chips faster than people realize. I keep my physical samples in a manila envelope in a toolbox, not on a wall or desk. For digital stuff, I just use a simple color checker app when I'm on site, takes ten seconds to confirm things haven't drifted. If you're not verifying your reference against real light at least once, you're basically gambling with the job.
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Last summer I had a whole set of color swatches I'd saved from a job back in 2020, and when I pulled them out for a new project the blues had shifted to a weird greenish tone. I started labeling every digital palette with the date and lighting conditions I picked them under, and now I set a reminder on my phone to re-check them every 3 months in natural daylight. For physical paint chips I learned to keep them in a dark drawer, not anywhere near a window, because even 6 months of indirect sun can change them. Just a little bit of tracking goes a long way to avoid that nasty surprise when the paint dries and doesn't match what you saw before.
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