Match any color to a real 3D-printing filament
You've got a color in mind — a brand blue, a skin tone from a reference photo, the exact green off a logo — and you need to know which filament actually prints it. Eyeballing a spool against a hex code rarely works: two colors that look identical on paper can read very differently in PLA. This tool does the comparison properly. Give it a color and it ranks hundreds of real filaments by how close they truly look, so the one at the top is the one to buy.
Set the color any way that's quickest: type or paste a hex code, click the swatch to open your system color picker, use the screen eyedropper to grab a color from anything on screen, or drop in a photo and click the exact pixel you want to match. The results update the instant you change the color.
Why it ranks by ΔE, not hex distance
Each match is scored with CIEDE2000 — written as ΔE — the industry-standard formula for how different two colors look to the human eye. Plain hex or RGB math treats every channel equally, but our eyes don't: we're far more sensitive to some shifts than others. ΔE accounts for that, so the ranking matches what you'd actually see on the print bed. As a rough guide, a ΔE under 1 is essentially indistinguishable, under 2 is excellent, and under about 3.5 is a match most people would call spot-on.
From a hex code, a photo, or your screen
The photo route is the useful one for matching something from the real world. Upload an image and the tool pulls out its main colors automatically — click one, or click anywhere on the photo to sample that single pixel. Nothing leaves your machine; the image is read and sampled locally. On Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Arc) the screen eyedropper lets you lift a color from any other window — a slicer preview, a product page, a render — without leaving the tab.
14 brands, and the honest caveat
Results span Bambu, Polymaker, Prusament, Overture, Hatchbox, Sunlu, eSUN, Elegoo, Creality, Anycubic, Fillamentum, ColorFabb, Protopasta and Prusa — filter to just the ones you buy. One thing worth saying plainly: these are reference swatches. A real spool shifts with the material finish (matte, basic, silk), your layer height, and the light you view it under, so use the match as a strong starting point and confirm against a real sample for anything critical.
Then paint it
Knowing the filaments is half the job. To actually print in those colors, open your model in Layerpaint, paint each region, and export a Standard 3MF — your slicer reads it as a multi-color print and assigns each color to a filament for an AMS or manual swaps. Need to prep a file first? Use the STL viewer or the 3MF ⇄ STL converter.