Method & sources

What is on the site

503 color chips across 12 families, 194 of them with at least one paint code, 957 car photographs, and a further 34 names documented by code only. Families follow Ferrari's own naming (Rosso, Giallo, Blu…), with two editorial decisions: Blu and Azzurro are shown as one family, sorted purely by lightness, with each chip tagged with the word Ferrari uses (Blu for medium and dark blues, Azzurro or Celeste for sky blues); and colors the blog lists under a family name but which read almost neutral are grouped in a Pale & cream section at the end of that family.

Hex values

Verified chips (299). Sampled from the flat color-chip images published on the Ferrari Colors blog: the centre 50% of each chip is averaged, and every chip was checked for uniformity. 6 chips that are not flat — iridescent, rainbow and exposed-carbon finishes — are marked "multi-tone finish · average shown". 24 colors also carry an alternate published value from Exotic Car Colors (with its RAL equivalent) so you can see where sources disagree; the chip value is used for sorting and matching.

Photo estimates (204). Where no chip exists but a photograph does, the color is estimated from the photo and the chip is drawn with a dashed border. 150 colors were estimated from ROSSOautomobili gallery photos and 49 from owner uploads on carpaints.co; the few others from auction photographs credited on the chip. Method: take the centre region of the photo, discard pixels that are too dark, too bright or unsaturated, keep only hues inside the family's expected range (reds 335–25°, yellows 38–72°, blues 200–262°, greens 70–200°, and so on — a low-saturation window in the right lightness band for greys, blacks and whites), find the dominant 10° hue bin, and take the median color of that cluster. This isolates the body panels from road, sky and foliage. Confidence reflects how much of the frame the cluster covered: high above 35%, medium above 15%, low below. Known weaknesses: dark metallic paint photographed under open sky reads bluer than the paint (Verde Silverstone, Verde Militare); warm indoor lighting skews silvers brown (Alluminio Lucido); a few samples come from non-Ferrari cars listed in the same paint and say so on the chip. One estimate (Rosso Bruno) was rejected because the sample returned yellow.

Tone bands and sort order

Every family page runs dark to light by CIE L* (lightness): Deep under 28, Dark 28–48, Mid 48–70, Light 70 and above. Pale & cream holds light colors whose chroma is under 22 and under 40% of the family's strongest light color. Photo estimates are interleaved with verified chips by lightness, not appended.

Aliases and renamed colors

Where a color is known under more than one name — Ferrari's own configurator spelling, a translated English name, or a retired name Ferrari replaced (Blu Ahrabian is now sold as Blu Abisso) — the alternatives are listed on the chip and the color page, and Search matches all of them. Renames are recorded only when owners or the factory have confirmed the paint is the same.

Pantone matches

Each hex is converted to CIE Lab and compared with a Pantone solid coated reference table (≈1,000 swatches) using the ΔE2000 formula; the lowest-ΔE swatch is shown. Under 2 is imperceptible, 2–5 a close visual match, above 5 a noticeable shift. A flat ink cannot reproduce a metallic, pearl or matte finish; treat the match as the closest printable reference and confirm finalists against an Atelier sample.

Paint codes

"20-X-nnn" (solid) and "106-X-nn" (metallic) are 1960s–70s Glidden-Salchi codes; five-digit Italver and Max Meyer numbers come from the coachbuilders' chip books of the same era, and "2.44x.xxx" numbers from the PPG/Italver charts. Three-digit Glasurit "FER" codes (100–1250, "/C" for metallic) are the early-1980s-onward system, replaced from the 1990s by PPG sticker codes (322, 4305, 740…) and six-digit PPG formula references. Codes marked (PPG) with three or four characters were read from paint-sticker photographs on carpaints.co. Ferrari's own parts catalogue lists the Glasurit, PPG and Glidden-Salchi paint stickers as genuine parts, which is how several code pairs (e.g. Rosso Corsa FER 300 / PPG 322 DS) were confirmed. Codes were transcribed from the sources below and cross-checked where two sources list the same color; where nothing is published the chip says "Not published". 188 chips are matched by exact name to a carpaints.co record, which supplies finish, paint type, layer count and, where absent elsewhere, a description.

Photographs

Photos come from the Ferrari Colors blog and from owner uploads on carpaints.co, captioned with the model. Local copies are stored in the site's img folder so the reference keeps working if a source goes offline; every photo links back to its source page, which carries the photographer credit. Click any photo to enlarge it.