On Sep 5, 2:25 pm, DerbyDad03 wrote:
The other day SWMBO says to me "I'd like those Bordeaux colored
shutters that I saw at Lowes."

So I take the new shutters over to the paint counter and asked for a
quart of matching paint for the trim. The guy in the red vest tries to
find the color Bordeaux in his computer. No go. He tries a couple of
paint chips but nothing matches. He tries to hold the 48" shutters up
to the little tiny color matching computer lens - the resulting
formula is not even close. "Sorry, I don't think I can match it."

I drive down the road to a local paint store and bring the shutters
in. The guy behind the counter grabs a keychain full of little
miniature shutters and finds one that's fairly close. "Let's start
with this and we'll tweak it from there." He mixes the formula found
on the back of the mini-shutter, brings it over and declares it "too
purple". A couple of drops of this and that and he hits it perfect on
the next try.

When I told him what happened at Lowes he said the computers don't
work very well with dark colors and the guys behind the counter are
too lazy to try and match the paint manually. Guess where I'm going
the next time I need paint?

My experience with the big boxes: If it's not a stock color or the
computer color match doesn't get the match right, you're toast. They
normally don't know jack about tweaking.

Guys at paint stores know colorants and how to tweak. Not all of them,
mind you -- it's rather amusing to see the formula written on the can
involving 8 colorants and the color is basically Light Tan. One
mistake requires an additional colorant to kill the mistake, so the
final formula can get quite "wordy".