Hello,
I have a question about colours in Enscape. I can use the exact colour from a suppliers site in Sketchup, which looks the same then. But then it looks very different in Enscape, obviously because of the lighting/ sky/ time of day/ season. Is this a mostly accurate representation of the colours used though? Which settings/ time of day, eg. would provide the most accurate representation? This is the only real place I'm mostly still stuck at at this time. Thanks for any help!
Regards
Thanks for your request Hume . 
Well, as you mentioned already, a lot of different factors play a role when it comes to rendering your project in general. If you generally want Enscape to look as close as similar to the SketchUp viewport for example, also color related, you might wanna turn down the "Rendering Quality" to "Draft" in the "Visual Settings" as this disables effects like Global Illumination for example which plays a role in the way regarding how colors are displayed.
If you like, please gladly send in a screenshot of both your model in SketchUp right next to Enscape - this way I can at least see your current setup and give you some tips from there on.
I just had this discussion at the office the other day and it always becomes frustrating. What I tell the non-viz people in the office is that we can get something close and representative but its going to be impossible to convey exact colors in any digital format. One example I give is a house painted white on a sunny day, cloudy day, and then at dusk and dawn. There is so many factors changing the color of that house from the lighting that it will never look like it does from a paint swatch, so how can we be expected to represent it realistically with that in mind? My suggestion is to always get it 80% close visually and then bring a physical swatch or materials board to the meeting.
I had the same problem recently, one of the schemes I’m working on has tan gravel driveways and brown brick walls, there are sections of a grey composite cladding that no matter what I did material wise it would render with a brown hue that was being cast from the brick and gravel.
The client was obsessive about it being grey and even though I proved to my boss that every setting I had available to me was pure grey it wasn’t good enough.
In the end I had to give it a blue tinge to make it “seem” grey, it works and the client is happy with “his grey” cladding but it was and still is an alien concept to my engineers brain.
One thing that causes this perceptual mismatch is white balance. Enscape currently does not do an automatic white balance. However, cameras do, and your eyes do it too, which makes you remember things less tinted as your brain automatically whitebalanced everything. It may help to use Enscape's color temperature adjustment or do in as a manual post step in PS.
Enscape currently does not do an automatic white balance.
"currently" ... does this imply a future feature? (+1 if so)
I work as an interiorarchitect and had the same issue in discussions with a client. For example if you see or buy a color you like chances are it will look quite different in shop versus when painted on your wall back home due to lighting conditions, bleeding or reflections from nearby planes (floor, roof, walls) or outside windows (i. e green trees, grass or nabour house wall) daylight or time of day, season of year. Also temperature of light or nearby color can manipulate the outcome. You can enhance or "kill" a color by using an "opposite" color or spesific lighting like used to make fruit and vegetables look more tempting in the supermarked. This is why trying to match a color in rendering with a chart is both hard and not natural.
I work as an interiorarchitect and had the same issue in discussions with a client. For example if you see or buy a color you like chances are it will look quite different in shop versus when painted on your wall back home due to lighting conditions, bleeding or reflections from nearby planes (floor, roof, walls) or outside windows (i. e green trees, grass or nabour house wall) daylight or time of day, season of year. Also temperature of light or nearby color can manipulate the outcome. You can enhance or "kill" a color by using an "opposite" color or spesific lighting like used to make fruit and vegetables look more tempting in the supermarked. This is why trying to match a color in rendering with a chart is both hard and not natural.
It becomes easy if you fix the hue/saturation in post production aka white balance. This is I think the only reasonable way to fix it. Dont change the content.
"currently" ... does this imply a future feature? (+1 if so)
We had this implemented once, but removed it. An automatic white balance in Enscape is only more confusing in this regard because you don't know exactly what's going on under the hood ("Enscape changes my colors automatically, what is going on?" 
)
How about removing the "automatic" element? just putting in a check-box?
The checkbox' name would be "Automatic white balance". If you want to do it manually, use the color temperature.
