Matching

Some things take a while to get around to fixing - today was the day for one of those things. It didn't go well. This is a long story - I hope you're following closely. You never know, some day you might need to do this ;-)

The story starts back at New Years Eve. While we were at our usual neighbours party, our son had his own party for all his friends. As we were only two doors away we thought what could go wrong? Having seen the devastation caused by the lad next door the other way we weren't too sure.

Anyway - we got back and there was relatively little damage - we thought we'd got away with it. There were just three spots of damage on the stairs and hall wall - soon fixed I thought. One of those is an often repeated problem caused by a nail that simply pops the plaster off the wall if its banged - a frequent occurrence over the years as the boys grew up. usually fixed easily. As I'm still just in the "fix it in six months" rule, I thought I'd better get it sorted.

So - back to today. Having filled the holes a day or two ago I thought it would be a ten minute job to sand down the filler and paint over. Part one - easy enough. However, could I find the two different cans of emulsion that had some dregs in when those walls were originally painted? Nowhere to be found! They're not easily hidden - great big paint cans (well plastic containers they are nowadays - can you call a plastic container a can?).

The thought of now painting the whole of the hall, stairs and landing just because of a bit of damage filled me with horror. So, this is todays blip!

My first thought was to get some paint made up by getting a match. Then, the thought of possibly getting tester pots that match sounded a great deal cheaper. How do I get the colour faithfully enough to match?

A grey card (in fact a collapsible lastolite grey/white cloth thingy) to get a correct exposure and colour setting, flash using a reflector, manual exposure then a repeat exposure of just the wall completely out of focus to get just the colour. Exposure and colour correction applied in LR and a colour selection made in PS. Hopefully its a suitable match - can't think how to capture the colour and intensity any other way.

Anyway, JPEGs created of the two colours and then apply to the Dulux colour matcher app for iOS and bingo - two colour tester pots identified that are hopefully more or less the correct colour. Fingers crossed that I can get them and cover up the original damage.