Color Codes, Formulas and Variations. Color Matching and Blending automotive paint.

Color matching is definitely one of the most difficult challenges a body shops faces when doing partial repairs.

Car manufacturers know and will provide the Color Code of every particular car they make, but that is not all that there is to it. The truth is that no manufacturer is totally consistent with their paint process and cars come out of the factory with the "same" Color Code and can have very big differences. This different versions of the same Color Code are known as variations.

Reasons for these variations (variants) are many: Adjustments and tolerances during the paint process, different paint processes in different plants, different suppliers for the same color, different materials being painted, different surface preparation, are just a few of them.

So when the painter gets the Color Code from the car that is just the beginning of his quest. The second step will be to search in his Paint System's formula database for that particular Color Code, the system will then show him Formulas (recipes) for all the known variations of that Color Code. and them he needs to decide what is the best alternative for the car in the paint booth.

This decision is nothing but an educated guess, he will use tools like Color Chips or the Spectrophotometer to get hints of the best Formula to choose, and then the third step will be to mix the selected Formula and try it out spraying a test panel to confirm that the color match is good.

Notice that I used the word good, because the color match is rarely perfect, specially right of the bat on the first try. So if this first try is not close enough to the color of the car he has two options: get a better match or blend it in.

To get a better match Formula list and choose another variant, or he can try to adjust the color on the fly using his color theory knowledge. Some painters are extremely skilled at this and they will be able to make adjust almost any paint, but this is something that takes years to master.

The other alternative is blending it in. Means to paint an additional area of the vehicle that still has the original color and make a soft transition between the new color and the original color. This process is also an art that only good painters are able to master, but when done properly the transition is so smooth that the eye can not catch the difference in the colors.

Every shop needs to decide in every job which strategy is going to use. Color Matching a color to perfection can take several hours in some cases, but blending the color usually involves painting additional panels of the car and using extra materials that otherwise can be saved.

As a conclusion I can can point out that the Color Matching process is not perfect, to be done properly it requires skill and knowledge from the painter. And in the majority of the cases is a compromise of finding the best available variant adjusting it slightly and blending the color in the car. Trying to avoid the blend is just not cost efficient in the long run.