I had some antique signs repainted. I asked them to match the original colors, and they said they could do that with a computer gadget. They kind of looked OK in the poor lighting of his shop, but they looked a bit off when I finally unloaded them from my truck a week later and saw them in sunlight. I pried up a gasket to see the original paint, and it’s not even close.
So is computer matching really that bad, or did someone fuck up at some point in the process? What do I do now? I’d rather not deal more with the same guy that made that kind of error, but at the same time I’d wonder if he’d give me a discount at trying again. I’d think that since they’ve been sandplasted, and primed and have a smooth intact paint coat now it would be fairly simple just put another coat on. There actually is a commercial spray paint that is a very close match, but spraypainting something is beyond my skills.
I guess generally speaking I’m not good at knowing when to take your losses and when to complain to people about stuff.
Unless you were given a guarantee that the paint would match you don’t have anything to complain about. Your sign was painted, and probably with a color you approved. It just wasn’t the right one. Computer matching can be extremely accurate, but I doubt your local paint shop used the kind of equipment necessary to do that job correctly, and even if so done, the paints are then hand mixed and slight inaccuracies in measuring can make a big difference, especially if the paint shop uses the wrong base as was done to me one time. To do this properly for your situation a sample would have to be painted first, allowed to dry, and then matched to the original, and the formulation adjusted until the results are correct.
So go back and complain and maybe you’ll get a small discount, or maybe you’ll find this guy took some pride in his work and the discount will be large, but he might just say “Sorry, you approved the color I was using”.
I’ve gotten paint matched (automotive paint) and it’s been a perfect match, even two different brands at different times (Dupont or PPG)
The hardest part is finding a large enough and flat area to sample. Then you need to gently polish the paint to remove the top layer of oxidation and get down to virgin paint.
I don’t know what happened with you, he might not have polished the paint down…the color can change quite a bit over the years between fading and staining.
I would have understood if the paint was faded or oxidized, but it was a metal electrical sign, and the inside had paint that looked brand new having never been exposed to the elements, and I specifically asked that the matching be done from the inside. (I also asked that the original parts that he fabricated replacement for be returned, which he didn’t do)
My experience with computerized paint chip matching was that the folks at the paint counter gave me lots of caveats about the accuracy of their system (or lack thereof) and they advised me to buy a small amount to start with in case it wasn’t a great match.
When I tried it, it was clearly darker than the rest of the wall, but I had a bit of white paint around and mixing a little white in worked like a charm. Or at least to my satisfaction.
Note that this was house paint, not automotive paint.
My experience has been that for light colors, the color matching is dead on perfect. As the colors get darker it becomes a little dicier, but still only noticeable if the two colors are side by side. Even on walls, if you switch colors at one of the corners, you won’t notice the difference.
Hmmm… my guess would be that as long as you are comparing two colors to see only if they are the same color, and you’re looking at them in the same light, then the lighting itself wouldn’t matter.
Yes, it will. Light deficient in particular wavelengths, like blue, for instance, will make different colors look very similar. Ever try to tell the difference between a blue car and a green one under an orange sodium vapor light like they use in cheap streetlights and parking lots?
I’ve found that it makes a big difference what lighting you’re in. The only way to be sure if something matches is if you’re in sunlight/natural light. Indoor lighting makes it very hard if not impossible to tell at times.
Depending upon the pigments you may get a perfect match, or a match that only works in one light. The question really coming down to whether the paint to be matched uses the same pigments as the paint doing the matching. If they don’t you can be assured of trouble, and probably an inability to get a satisfactory match. Trying to match a vintage paint could be a problem simply because the base pigments are now different. They way the eye perceives colour is sufficiently messy that you can get two colours of paint that appear identical in one light, yet look quite different in another, a phenomenon called metameric failure.
The computer matching system will probably use a standard illuminant (likely a standard daylight 6500K) and will look at the spectral response and map it to a colour, then see if it can find a pigment combination that matches that colour. The weasel word in this is the “colour” it maps to. This is defined by three numbers only, and is not the full spectral characterisation of the paint. It is only meaningful for one light source. If the old paint is made with the same sorts of pigments as the new paint, there is a good chance that the pigment mix chosen will actually be a clone of the old paint, and the colour will match perfectly. But if the old paint’s pigments are fundamentally different, there little chance (and indeed it may be intrinsically impossible) for the new paint to match the old one under all light conditions.
The sheen will often make a difference in how a color seems to look. A glossy dark blue will look different in some lighting conditions from the same dark blue pigments in a flat sheen.
What I’ve noticed in paints (alkyds, lacquer, and latex) for residential remodel (one of my businesses), is that the machine will often be very close, but having a trained eye tweaking it will get it virtually indistinguishable. And the trained eye person needs to figure out the sheen. Stains are another issue because of different variables of the staining/finishing process.
In particular, things can look dodgey under white LEDs. Normal white light has a broad spectrum. White LED light has 3 or 4 very narrow spectrum components, balanced to look white. But when you use it to look at colors produced by fairly narrow-spectrum pigments, you can get odd results.
For a similar reason, you can’t use traditional gels with LED spots, in stage lighting. The gels (colored filters) just don’t have the same effect on the LED light that they would on broad spectrum white light.
However, we have LED white lights indoors, and I haven’t noticed any serious oddness in the colors of things. On the other hand, I’m used to colors simply looking different indoors and under artificial light than they do outdoors, so maybe it’s there and I just don’t notice it.
LEDs are the worst case, being monochromatic. But I believe we can see similar issues with any light source that’s not fairly broad-spectrum and fairly flat.
Yeah, that too. I don’t know quite why that is, unless the sheen reflection also has a color component to it that’s different from the pigment. But that doesn’t quite make sense. Still, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen what you’re talking about.
I’m not sure about this, but I think the sheen can cause the paint to reflect or absorb colors at different angles from the light source. Industrial color measurements use carefully selected white light, as relected from a block of barium(?) IIRC.
I’m not sure your methodology is correct here. Did you have them match the area under the gasket in the first place? Because that area has been protected from fading and sun, while the area they tested may not have been.
Back to the OP, I think you should give the guy the opportunity to make it right.
And what did he offer as an excuse for not saving the old parts as agreed? That would upset me too.
