Painting’s one of those industries that seems like it hasn’t changed much in the past, oh, thousand years or so. I mean, it’s just paint, right? Well, not exactly. The truth is, like just about everything else in recent times, painting has been changed drastically by new tech, and it’s actually getting better every day.
From safer formulas that look better to new ways of applying paint, there have been some huge advances in the last few decades to the concept of painting, and none of them is more amazing in our minds here at Prestige Painting than the super-cool future tech of color matching.
Color-matching, the art of taking a color from life and mixing a paint to match it, is so neat, in fact, that it can even seem a bit like magic to those who don’t know how it works. With that in mind, we thought we’d throw a little guide together and shine some light on this amazing practice for you guys.
The Spectrophotometer: Not Something from Star Trek
Just about any major supply store that sells paint has a special machine these days that works that crazy color-matching magic, and the key to the whole operation is a super-expensive tool called a spectrophotometer.
What this thing does is pretty darn neat, if you ask us. The spectrophotometer is somewhat like a camera, in that you put something in front of it and it takes in the light from the object. However, there’s no printable image with a spectrophotometer, as what it actually does is read the waves of light emanating from whatever is in front of it. It does this by shining a bright light on the object, so it can see it exactly how it is, and it then records everything reflected by the object, letting it understand exactly how much of each color is in the object. This info is then sent to a paint mixing machine that pours the exact right formula together about 90% of the time, the other 10% being just a slight bit off.
Wait, So How Do I Use this Thing?
All of that’s super fancy, but how does this apply to a real-life painting situation? What it says for you, the one with the big painting project, is that you can now take many objects in to your local store and come out with a matching color! That bit of fabric you’ve been saving because you like the color, or that chair you’ve always wanted to match? Should be no problem for the spectrophotometer!
That is not to say, however, that the machine is perfect. There are some things that are very difficult to get a color match on simply due to their construction. This includes things that are highly textured (a super fuzzy scarf probably won’t work), things that have a lot of sheen, which will reflect the machine’s light, things that have too many colors in them (such as a pattern) or things you have too little of. You need at least a quarter-sized piece of something for the spectrophotometer to get a read, so when you’re looking for things to sample, keep that in mind.
Now how cool is that noise? With this new tech, we can use the whole world as our palette, and no color, not even that of the gorgeous designer dress you’ve always loved, is out of our reach. It could even go on your cabinets, and as the cabinet painters Birmingham trusts with their homes, we should know! We at Prestige think color-matching is just dandy, not to mention being seriously cool part of living in the future. Who knows what new advances will come next? Paint that matches your mood, anyone?
