How Basecoat Lab decides what counts as a match.
A match number is only worth trusting when the method behind it, and the places it stops being reliable, stay in plain view.
Basecoat Lab is a free tool for miniature and wargaming painters. Pick any paint and it shows the closest colors in every other brand, drawn from a catalog of 2,585 measured colors across 12 brands. This page explains how those matches are worked out, where the color data comes from, and what a high percentage does and does not promise.
01 · Color
How a match is computed
Every paint in the catalog has a measured swatch color. To compare two of them we use CIEDE2000, the standard formula for color distance. It reports the gap between colors the way a human eye tends to see it, so a difference that looks small to a painter comes out as a small number and one that jumps out comes out large. We take that perceptual distance and turn it into the similarity percentage shown in the tools. A result in the 90s means the two colors sit close enough that most painters would treat them as the same on the model; drop toward 80 and the difference is something you would notice in the pot and on the brush.
02 · Source
Where the colors come from
The colors come from measured and official swatch data, assembled into our own catalog rather than lifted from someone else's finished chart. Community conversion lists are useful and we consult them, but only as a cross-check on our own numbers, never as a source to copy. Every swatch on the site is rendered straight from a color value. Nothing you see is a manufacturer photograph or a scraped product listing, which keeps the comparison about the color itself and not about how a bottle was lit for a catalog shot.
03 · Finish
Why finish is ranked before color
Color distance on its own will happily match a metallic silver to a flat grey, or a thin wash to an opaque black, because those paints can share a color value while behaving nothing alike once they hit the model. So before ranking by color we sort every paint into a finish class and rank same-finish matches first. A close color in a different finish is not hidden, but it is flagged rather than offered as a straight swap, because swapping across finishes changes coverage, sheen, and how the paint reads under varnish.
04 · Limits
What the percentage does not promise
A high percentage is a strong place to start, not a guarantee. A screen makes color out of light while a pot reflects it, so the two never line up exactly. Real paint shifts between production batches, and it shifts again with how far you thin it and what you laid down underneath: the same color over a black undercoat and over a white one will not read the same. Treat a strong match as the shortlist to test on a spare model or a hidden edge, not as a drop-in that skips the test.
05 · Catalog
How the catalog is organized for search
All 2,585 colors in the catalog get a page, but every individual color page is deliberately kept out of the search index — the brand pages, range pages, and conversion charts carry the indexing instead, so templated pages never pad it. It is the standard we would want ourselves when looking a color up.