I think SW paints have mostly gray undertones in their lighter colors and it's turning me off.
I understand what you are saying but let me suggest a different way to think about this. Because until you better understand the factor of gray that is bothering you, you're going to have the same issues no matter what brand your shopping.
The concept of undertones does not apply to architectural coatings and there is no such thing as gray undertones. The explanation for why this is true is long and I don't want to bore everyone. You'll just have to trust me that the way I'm going to show you to think about color will help because we can focus specifically on the grayness issue. Here we go...
Every color belongs to a hue family. Colors are organized within their hue family in steps of grayness - from saturated to neutral gray. Those steps of grayness are called chroma. Chroma is the quantification of our perception of grayness. Chroma and grayness mean the same thing. Here's what those steps of chroma look like.
I think SW paints have mostly gray undertones in their lighter colors and it's turning me off.
You just happen to have collected chips that are low in chroma and therefore look more gray. Like all paint brands, SW has a range of lighter colors that have different amounts of grayness -- or chroma. Here are three SW colors in order of grayness from most to least. They all belong to the blue hue family and are close-ish in terms of lightness.
If you pull the real chips, you'll see the steps of grayness more accurately than the digital color chips here.
As you can see from the spectral data (color DNA) below, all the colors are very close in terms of "Hue" and "Family" but differ in chroma which is Column "c" highlighted in green.
Using a chroma value to predict how gray a color will look is exactly like using LRV to predict how light or dark a color will look - both are spectral data points (color DNA).
I would suggest you use the colors that you think are too gray to find colors that are less grayed. We'll call these your gray benchmarks.
In the color display at the store find the hue family that you want first - like blue. Next look for colors within that blue hue family section that don't look as gray as your gray benchmark chips - physically compare the chips. You can do that because now you know what grayness is and how to look for it.
Hopefully, this illustrates why there is no such thing as "gray undertones" and why thinking in terms of hue family and chroma is a more focused way to find the paint colors you want.
Q
Every color belongs to a hue family. Colors are organized within their hue family in steps of grayness - from saturated to neutral gray. Those steps of grayness are called chroma. Chroma is the quantification of our perception of grayness. Chroma and grayness mean the same thing. Here's what those steps of chroma look like.
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