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Lighting for colour mixing matching


Jimlad

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I'm trying to evaluate paint colour and get it to closely match source materials. One of these would be handy, however my budget is more towards this.

 

I appreciate this won't be a concern for many but wondered if anyone has found an affordable way to light/view their work in a consistent reliable way? 

 

 

 

 

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34 minutes ago, Jimlad said:

has found an affordable way to light/view their work in a consistent reliable way? 

 

Daylight. it's free as well.  ;)

 

If you are trying to colour match,  you need daylight,  ideally north facing around midday, but not in direct light.

 

I'll put in a @Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies  as a man who runs a paint company and so know a thing or two about matching colour.  You can get a spectrometer if you really need to get an exact match.

 

Oh, and not meaning to be rude, but how is your colour vision?   

https://www.xrite.com/hue-test

Quote

The X-Rite Color Challenge and Hue Test

Are you among the 1 in 255 women and 1 in 12 men who have some form of color vision deficiency? If you work in a field where color is important, or you’re just curious about your color IQ, take our online challenge to find out.

 

 

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Hi,

 

Troy tagged me in above so I can share a couple of observations from doing this quite a bit.

 

I run a small "boutique" brand of model paint and making big standard FS595, RAL or BS381C shades is a dawdle (hence why so many sell those for things which weren't). We do have quite a few shades which are not sufficiently equivalent to the easy stuff for my liking and as a result sometimes our journey leads to having to make the first chip for production matching against by hand.

 

No.1: there's simply no substitute for good daylight if doing it by eye. Even that Pantone light box thingy has limitations.

 

No.2: almost always a paint dries a different shade compared to how it looked wet. One often doesn't notice on a model, but when practising trying to match an existing chip you can get what you think is close wet, then look again when it's dry and you missed it by miles - so you need to mix paint in a sealable container and dry samples of it to evaluate.

 

No.3: my colour perception is very good, however like the vast majority of people very good isn't good enough for comparing olives and browns in particular. Different daylight gives different perspectives. I am trying to come up with good matches for the DuPont equivalents of RAF Dark Green and Dark Earth at the moment and it's difficult. If you're serious enough about this that you're concerned about lighting, then the best advice I can give is to figure out what to sell from the stash to cover one of these. It will remove all subjectivity from the equation as well as variables which are difficult to control such as lighting. It will give you accurate colourspace coordinates which you can compare with those of what you're trying to match, and those coordinates will tell you how to adjust your wet batch to iterate in on your target.

https://www.nixsensor.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjwnIr1BRAWEiwA6GpwNVspmQIxZ-qQjMgxbU8csjJPmgjIToZN63zD3eLPTv_QL7UCP5BUOhoCBcoQAvD_BwE

 

I have one and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in this sort of thing. It's inexpensive compared to desktop spectrophotometers yet compares very well in terms of accuracy and repeatability, it's easy to use and it's small enough to carry in your pocket and take cheeky measurements of things in museums and archives etc. I measured HMS Victory with mine.

 

Lastly and perhaps most importantly - you can give all other men in the Valspar isle at B&Q a massive inferiority complex by using it to measure their card samples, tut, put it back and select another. This was not obvious to me at first, but once I observed the looks I was getting one day I decided I enjoyed having this gadget very much indeed.

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Thanks all for some really interesting replies. 

 

Thoughts in response;

Daylight, even at midday in ideal weather conditions, bounces all over the place indoors and isn't ideal which is why photographers use studio flash etc for colour critical stuff.

I'm not trying to match to industry standards ral/pantone etc. I'm trying to match the colour of an object to that of paint and I'll evaluate it once dry. My colour perception is ok but even if it were off I'm matching to my own perception not a colour model. (Thanks for the links). I have an x-rite Colormunki spectrophotometer thingy (more aimed at print profiling) and I'm familiar with digital colour profiles etc, but my eyes are more convenient and I think I'm after a simple viewing area (box?) which minimises other light and gives a consistent daylight / full spectrum illumination. Having said that, that nix sensor looks really handy, have you got the more expensive version Jamie? I'd be interested in how you use it in a workflow. I wonder if a couple of full (96% or higher) spectrum bulbs would suffice (thanks for those links Brian) but damn that Nix thing has got me interested.

 

My workflow at present involves cutting up some white scrap card into small strips, mixing colour and painting it onto the end of a strip then holding this up right next to the object I'm trying to match to. Too warm or too whatever and I make adjustments and hold it up again until I'm satisfied. This is then sprayed onto a primed cast which dries quickly and is then evaluated again against the object/original. Frequently this is all done multiple times until I get a very close match.  The spray booth and mixing area are at different areas in the room and it can be a bit laborious...

 

Cheers,

 

Jim

 

 

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Sorry chaps,

 

I have the Nix Pro, but version 1. They've got several models now I see and the Nix Pro V2 is just over half the price we paid for ours'. They're really good value compared to a desk-top spectrophotometer which is well into 4-figure sums of money.

 

I hazard a guess that even their $99 Mini version would be a very handy tool for the amateur modeller using it to mix model paints and certainly much better than eye-balling. Imagine the discussions on this forum about model paints and how they compare to published chips but using CIELAB coordinates rather than subjective vagaries and universally inconsistent lighting!

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17 hours ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

I have the Nix Pro, but version 1.

Thanks for the clarification. Maybe something to save up for! I couldn't really get a grip on the differences between the pro and the mini - not knowing enough about the subject area.

 

It would be really interesting to gather info from museums, artefacts etc.

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I'm trying to imagine it for practical use for direct mixing of small quantities of paint. Would you still manually mix an estimated shade which once dry the Nix device would give you say a cmyk (?) breakdown of your target colour in comparison to your mixed colour. Let's say the mixed colour has too much yellow and black you'd then what, add more of the cyan and magenta to adjust the ratios... hmmm, cmyk models are used in print but are they useful for mixing artists acrylics or enamels? You'd probably need white as well. Whatever colour space was used wouldn't you need standardised base colours to mix from? So I'd be interested Jamie in how you use it in your workflow, lets say you check a colour of paint and it's not quite right do you eyeball and adjust it based on experience or start again...? Or do you have a really expensive paint mixing machine that does it all for you ...🙄

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