Color Matching for Wallpaper Reproductions

Very close, and often indistinguishable. Your blues will be blue and your greens green; any variance is slight. How slight depends on the service level: Studio Express delivers a close visual match, typically within 2–4%, and Precision Archival reverse-engineers color to within 1–2%.

We tell you up front, on the estimate, how close we expect to get with your particular sample, and you approve a printed proof before a single roll is produced.

Bold blues, oranges and reds, and some families of beiges and creams. Older wallpapers were printed with premixed solid inks, some made from pigments like ultramarine or cadmium, that hit saturations a four-color digital process can only approximate. If your pattern leans on those hues, we'll flag it when we assess your sample.

Not with ink. We don't print metallic or fluorescent inks, and a digital print is flat, without the raised relief of a screen or block print. For metallics we print full color over a white ink layer on metallic substrates like Gold Flash or Silver Flash. For texture, textured substrates such as Grasscloth, Canvas, Suede or Mystical bring back a physical surface.

Light and surroundings. A sample matched under daylight-balanced light reads differently under warm incandescent or LED bulbs, and wall paint, trim and furniture all shift how the eye reads a color. That's why the proof is mailed to you, so you judge it in the room it's going into, under its own light.

Many matches land in the first round, and two is common. Studio Express includes up to 3 rounds of proofs and Precision Archival up to 5, for patterns with many colors or work that answers to a preservation board.

Round one we match in-house as closely as possible, under natural and artificial light, and mail it to you. A second round is usually driven by the number and complexity of the colors and by the colors of your space.

Side by side with your original, in a professional lightbox and under both natural and artificial light, on a press calibrated monthly and matched against our 20,000+ color library. The proof you receive is printed on the same material as your final run.

The deciding part. You review the proof in your space and tell us where a color reads warm, cool, light or dark; we adjust the mix and send the next round. Your sign-off on a printed proof is what releases production.

Pantone (6,631 colors), Benjamin Moore (3,676), Valspar (2,858), Behr (2,470), Dunn-Edwards (1,848), Sherwin-Williams (1,535) and Farrow & Ball (303). Physical chip matching against Pantone, Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore is part of Precision Archival.

Send paint chips or color references along with your wallpaper sample. A named color from one of the libraries above gives us a fixed target and cuts down the rounds, which also shortens the schedule on an urgent project.

We usually advise against it. Next to an aged original, even a close match can show, and locking in every color for a small patch can take many rounds, costing more than the printing itself. Reprinting the whole wall is almost always the better result. If insurance or a third party is covering repeated sample rounds, we're glad to take it on, with expectations set from the start.

Yes. Digital reproduction is available as a standalone service: we scan, repair and color-separate your artwork and hand off the print-ready file to the print shop of your choice. If you need every aspect of a vintage print reproduced, including raised ink and metallic inks, a traditional screen or block printer is the route, at considerably more time and cost.