Randy Hees wrote: On my last visit to Stanford and the book, Jim Wilke brought the Nevada State Railroad Museum's Munsel chips... We found that they didn't cover the very deep colors we found.
That is difficult to imagine. The Munsell notation can describe any color, but the chips in the Munsell books only start at 2.5/ which is very dark, to the point where very little chroma saturation is possible. So they don't bother with 2/ and 1/, to get those you would have to interpolate.
Beware, there's also a Munsell book called "Nearly Neutrals Edition" which focuses very intensely on pastels.
Here is a standard sheet for 5B hue http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Bzloo47onOc/S ... G_0504.JPG
Here is a Nearly Neutral http://www.unitycolor.com/images/produc ... /163_6.jpg
There is a huge bias in the paint-selection industry toward pastels -- because most chosen paint colors are for building exteriors or interiors, that's where the money is. People paint houses "eggshell" or "Sahara tan" but never "Traction orange".
Dave wrote: If I may be so bold as to suggest bringing a commercial color chart from Home Depot with you to compare...
Hmm, having tried that on more than one occasion, I have not had much luck. Those are generally made to help you choose colors, not match them. (Same is true of Pantone.) For matching, they have those little scanners. But IME, many railroad colors are out of gamut for their machine (read: requires so much pigment it would overflow the can.) See above: "bias toward pastels".
Quote: ...there may be something out there that any of us could pick up at the store that would be a decently close match. Even latex house paint chips can be color matched in Delstar. Once you develop real matched chips, ARM / TRAIN conventions would be the logical place to share them.
But you realize that sort of data has a short shelf life, because pigments go obsolete at an astonishing rate. You're lucky if a paint formula is good 10 years later. This is why "Get the 50 year old pigment formula, run to the paint store" is not going to work.
Automotive paints move even faster IME.
Paint companies are not in the business of holding colors constant across decades. It's too much work and other people do it better (Pantone and especially Munsell), and their customers who care about that sort of thing are already using those systems (or ought to). They're not interested in matching old formulas because they don't want customers complaining that it doesn't match the old weathered paint. Paint companies hate mis-mixes, and they've nearly eliminated them with the color scanners and computer controlled paint mixers.
Pantone is about style; and assuring you get consistent results from your printers. They don't care if Coca-Cola Red drifts a little over 20 years, they care if it's the same from Argentina to China.
Munsell is a notation for describing any color. See also CIE. Given any color you can resolve its notation, and then, you can weld it on the car :) and your great grandchild can read it off and tell the paint company to match it.
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