This came about during a walk near fields of ripe barley. I, as you would, asked my partner what colour the barley was. I challenged the first response of ‘wheaty’ and we got to describing what we could see, which seemed to be cream with a hint of pink. Then I realised I could bring the power of digital photography to bear, so I took a picture of the field.

When I got back I loaded the image into Photoshop and blurred it to even-out the range of tones. I then sampled the colour and looked at the RGB coordinates. There is a useful website at e-paint that takes RGB values and finds the best matching paint. Of the easily-available ranges, Johnstone’s had a colour that was a good match.

There is also a website that will give you the RGB values of a named colour. I used this to find the values for British Racing Green to use as a colour tone in a mono picture.

I couldn’t leave it there though, could I? One of our lads was looking at a new flat but really liked the colour in one he had seen on an online estate agent’s website. So we found the picture, sampled the colour and found the paint. Simples.
Interior decorating through the power of photography.