Color QC and Matching Blog

Spot On: Lessons from a Color-Matching Master

Posted by Elaine Becker on Wed, Mar 10, 2010
As the North American Manager of Color Services for Pittsburgh-based PPG, a $16 billion per year manufacturer of paints, coatings, chemicals, optical and glass, Shelley Sturdevant knows something about color matching. She manages and oversees color control for the Coil and Extrusion coatings business at 10 facilities nationwide, with a color palette currently holding over 100,000 colors.

We had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with Shelley as she shared some of what she's learned managing color for PPG over the years:

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Tags: OnColor, Color correction, color matching, color formulation, color standard

Color Me Stressed Out

Posted by Elaine Becker on Mon, Dec 07, 2009
If we put you under the spectrophotometer now, would you show up in deep shades of recession blue? Perhaps.

Tough economic times often mean having to make do with fewer resources to handle the workload. The same workload for developing new colors, adjusting production batches, and approving colors is spread over fewer people. Staff become stressed and can easily overlook color shifts they might otherwise have caught.

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Tags: Color correction, Color difference, color development, color matching, color spectrophotometer

Color Matching of Plastics and Coatings

Posted by Elaine Becker on Tue, Sep 22, 2009
The latest newsletter of the Color and Appearance Division of the Society of Plastics Engineers contained a noteworthy article that should be read by anyone involved in the coloring of plastics or coatings.  Bruce Mulholland of Ticona authors a technical article "Effect of Additives on the Color & Appearance of Plastics".  It can be found in the SPE CADNEWS Summer2009 starting on page 14 at:

http://www.4spe.org/technical-groups/newsletters/105

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Tags: Color correction, color development, color matching

Color Correction – How to use your color software to get practical answers

Posted by Elaine Becker on Thu, Jul 16, 2009
Have you experienced a case where the color computer wants to double the batch size and add a ton of white to correct a batch?  Or maybe it's adding some red and you think the color is already too red? A common complaint about color matching software is that it gives bad answers or impractical adds to correct the color of a batch. 

Well...this frequently happens when a minor colorant is overshot in the batch and the only way the computer knows to correct it is to dilute it out by adding all of the other colorants.  Remember, the color computer is always trying to go for the perfect match or DE=0.00.  Often times this is not the "perfect answer" in the practical world.  The colorist is frequently able to accept a small color difference if he can fix the batch with the add of one colorant, or a small add of two colorants.    In these cases, using the manual correction features of OnColor can solve the problem by giving you control with practical choices on how to adjust the color of a batch.

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Tags: Color correction, color matching

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