Color Matching

Does It Really Work?

Maybe you’ve created your own custom color from paints lying around the basement, only to find that you can’t figure out how to replicate it. Or perhaps you moved into a house with a paint color scheme that you love, but it needs some touching up. You head down to local store and come home armed with a pocketful of paint chips, thinking surely one of the colors will match, but no luck. Who knew there were so many different shades of green?

As we learned from our big box of Crayolas, purple isn’t just purple and red isn’t just red. You can choose from cornflower blue, midnight blue, blue-gray, blue-green and the list goes on. Colors are actually waves of light, and each wavelength has a value that makes it different from the rest. A color can be described by how pure or desaturated it is, as well as its value or lightness. So describing something as green or even blue-green isn’t going to be specific enough if you’re trying to find the exact color. There could even be 10 different shades of blue-green. So how could you possibly expect to find that color you’re looking for?

Fear not, because your perfect match is out there. And the machine that can find it is called a spectrophotometer. Spectrophotometers have been used in the auto industry for years to seamlessly touch up that cherry paint job, and fortunately for you, we use the industries leading equipment to match your paint. The best part is that the service is free.

Read on to find out how a spectrophotometer works.

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To properly understand how a spectrophotometer works, we first need to understand how color works. This is a broad topic, so for our purposes, we’ll do a brief overview. Color is made up of wavelengths of light and can be broken into six categories:

As you can see, visible light is somewhere in the middle, and this is what the spectrophotometer analyzes to match paint. The visible light spectrum is composed of good ol’ ROY G. BIV, which is an acronym for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. These seven colors make up all the different colors we can see with the naked eye. Black is the absence of color, and white is made up of all of these colors. This will come into play in a minute.

A spectrophotometer is actually a pretty simple piece of machinery, about the size of a shoe box. The basic components of a spectrophotometer are:

Because it’s made up of all of the colors in the visible spectrum, white light is the illumination source used in a spectrophotometer, in the form of a tungsten bulb or in more advanced models, a Light Emitting Diode (LED). A clip located on the outside of the machine holds the paint sample to be matched, and white light is flooded onto the sample. This light is reflected off the sample back into the machine and onto a small wheel. The wheel is a highly efficient color analyzer, consisting of a number of interference filters and powered by a stepper motor, which is known for its precision.

Visible light is measured in nanometers, which is a tiny unit of measurement in the metric system, equal to one-billionth of a meter. Each filter is programmed to allow a specific wavelength of light to pass through it, and each wavelength is within a particular range of nanometers. The visible light spectrum ranges from the reds at 400 nm to the blues in the 700nm range, and the most efficient wheels have filters that handle intervals of 10 nm each.

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