Light & Pigment helps you choose paint colors for the room and the light you actually have: a dark basement, a north-facing bedroom, a small bathroom. Every guide gives you real numbers and real paint names instead of adjectives.
Where the colors come from
Each color is measured from a public-domain painting in the open-access collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Painters spent their careers making colors work together, so every palette here is a combination that has already been proven on canvas. Paintings for which the museum only has a black-and-white photograph are skipped.
What every guide shows
Light reflectance value (LRV). A number from 0 (black) to 100 (white) that tells you how bright a wall will read. Above about 60 bounces light around a room; below about 20 reads deep and dark.
How the color shifts with light. Each lighter color is previewed in cool north light, warm south sun and under evening lamps, so you can see the version your room will get.
The closest real paints. The nearest color from Sherwin-Williams, Behr, Farrow & Ball and Valspar, compared with the CIEDE2000 color-difference formula and labelled from “near-identical” to “similar”. Brands with nothing close are left out. We have no affiliation with any paint brand and are not paid for these matches.
How the guides are made
Guides answer questions people actually search for. The colors, LRV values and paint matches are calculated by our own software. The explanatory text is written with the help of AI from those measured facts, under strict rules: no invented history, quotes or statistics, and no number that does not come from the measurement.
A note on screens
Colors on a screen differ from paint on a wall, and every room’s light is different. Use the matches as a starting point and always test a sample on your own wall, in the morning and in the evening.
Get in touch
Spotted a mistake, have a question about a color, or want to suggest a topic? Send us a message.