About Swatch Ledger

Swatch Ledger is a reference for people who have a RAL number in their hand and a job to do: a gate to coat, a door to repaint, a bike frame to send to the powder coater, a set of kitchen doors to spray. The chart on the home page lists every RAL Classic shade from RAL 1000 green beige to RAL 9023 pearl dark grey, each on its own page with approximate screen values, the nearest shades and notes on where the colour turns up and how it behaves in paint.

What the chart is, and what it is not

The swatches are approximations drawn by your screen. We start from published sRGB approximations of each shade and work out the other numbers (RGB, HSL, a naive CMYK, CIE Lab and the colour difference to neighbouring shades) from that one value. That makes the chart useful for finding a number, comparing two greys or picking a shortlist. It does not make it a colour standard.

RAL is a trademark of RAL gGmbH. Swatch Ledger is an unofficial reference: we do not publish RAL colour cards, and nothing here replaces a printed RAL fan deck or a painted sample of the product you are going to use. The luminous, pearl and aluminium shades in particular cannot be shown on any screen. Before you order paint or powder, look at the real thing in daylight.

Who writes it

The colour notes are written by five people with different corners of the subject:

• Lotte Brandsma covers screens, print, hex values, NCS and fan decks.
• Dieter Kaufmann covers powder coating, metal preparation, primers and rust.
• Saoirse Malone covers spray work and restoring bikes, motorbikes and old machinery.
• Bram Visser covers front doors, window frames, garage doors, fences and railings.
• Petra Lindahl covers colour at home and matching RAL numbers in paint you can buy.

We write from paint and powder data sheets, standards that are widely published and ordinary workshop practice. When something depends on the product, we say so and point you to the maker's own instructions. We do not run a laboratory and we do not claim to have measured anything.

Links to shops

Some pages carry links to shops and services. Where a shop pays us a small commission on purchases, the page says so near the link, and the link is marked as sponsored. Commissions never decide what we recommend or which colours we write about, and a page never needs a shop link to be complete. The privacy notice explains the cookies those shops may set when you click.

Corrections

Colour references attract mistakes: a wrong number, a misspelled name, a hex value copied from somewhere unreliable. If you spot one, the contact page reaches us and corrections go first.