Message text written by "BP - \"BullaPinmankaheaders\""
>What the hell is pink? The project has been sitting 
idle with the dark brownstone with several square mock-up swatches for the 
whole season. We have not received any payment as we consider the project
not 
completed. The customer is happy so they don't call us. Landmarks is busy. 
The job has gotten lost in the shuffle and is no longer carried on our 
current project list. Is there a way to determine an objective measure of 
color match without reliance on human intervention of taste and decorum?
HELP!

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Edison Coatings owns a portable spectrophotometer and a laptop computer
which is all we need to do on-site color measurement. We are considering
offering on-site color matching services at some time in the future, if the
market can bear the cost, compared with matching samples sent to our
laboratory.

Spectrophotmeters are objective, but... A numerically good color match is
not necessarily going to be perceived by the eye to be a good match. And
sometimes the eye can't pick up what the spectrophotometer sees as a
relatively large difference. Then there is the issue of metamerism. That
is, that what looks like a great color match at noon on a sunny day can
look perfectly awful at dawn on an overcast day, etc., etc. Different
pigments respond differently to different light sources and angles of view.
The same color match looks different in Florida than it does in Chicago.

That is why in the course of typical color matching work, the software has
to be set to prefer the "least metameric" color match, as some
spectrophotometer/software packages are capable of figuring in 3 different
lighting conditions at the same time.

As for NY Landmarks, yes they can be picky, but picky people usually drive
us to do our best work. We went through a challenging breathable masonry
coating color match "situation" with Landmarks on a sandstone building on
W. 18th Street with our Elasto-Tone 353 last year. Once the computer color
match was generated, multiple "off-shades" had to be produced, and they
finally picked one. A pain in the neck with the contractor parked in our
loading dock 4 hours after we were supposed to close for our Christmas
shutdown, but the job got done and I have to say, it is a really good match
to the original sandstone color.

As for painting in grains of sand, nobody can make checkerboard paint but
sometimes a little texture in the coating creates enough shadow to give a
more varied and "natural" appearance.

Mike Edison
Edison Coatings, Inc.