Colour match v's expensive paint

[jengles]

Having moved into the house of yellow (literally every interior wall, enhanced by oak flooring throughout!), we're looking to re-paint throughout.

However, we can't decide whether to bite the bullet & go for F&B or Little Green Company, or save money & use colour matched paint (which we've seen promoted on Instagram/seen trade places near us that do it).

DH is concerned colour matched won't be as good quality, but as we're looking to get a painter & decorator in to do it, I wonder if there's less chance of it looking rubbish.

Any tips or experience?!

Our friend is a painter and decorator and she colour matched F&B paint for us (in a room with real F&B paint already) and it looks perfect... couldn't vouch for it every time but it's a pretty scientific process so matching should be, well, pretty matched. But we have used the shop bought matching service before and had very different results!

Our decorator used Dulux trade and recommended their match for F&B colours. It was similar but not exactly the same, so that we ended up buying some real F&B for the final coat. I think the colour was the same but the paint finish was different, which can make quite a difference in the way light is absorbed / reflects, so the way it looks, which does affect the colour it appears to be, slightly.

It's not that the matched version looks bad, just a little bit different. The paint quality is fine. F&B is more delicate and easily damaged, if anything.

The colour is usually matched very well, it's the finish that is different. I second doing an F&B final coat to get the texture.
One thing I found you can't do it mix and match, so make sure in future you touch up with the same product., You can really see the difference in finish otherwise and it looks awful

We used Johnson's colour matched. It was better quality than F & B but just didn't have quite the depth of colour.

We got valspar colour match for F&B, it was spot on.
What gave me comfort - which I recommend doing - is first get a tester of the colour match, and buy a tester of the F&b. You can then paint them on the wall or big bit of white paper to move around, and compare. We did this before to check and you can see a teeny tiny difference in some lights but definitely not enough to justify many hundreds of pounds worth of paint!

We just finished painting and we used Little Greene colour matched with Dulux trade.
It looks good!
For the same amount of paint we would have spent close to double the price if we didn't colour match.