Match makers

Exact colour matching of different parts of a car has until now been a well-nigh impossible task. Although few of us notice that a bumper, say, is a different shade to the vehicle's body, German researchers have developed a way to match the colours more accurately.

The parts are painted by different suppliers, so to ensure the desired colours and special effects are accurately matched a team from the

, IFAM, has developed a computer program to distinctly characterise complex colour shades.

This information can than be electronically passed on to suppliers — a far cry from the slow and error-prone procedure requiring companies to exchange painted metal colour chips, or product samples and have them visually matched by trained colourists.

One of the biggest obstacles to exact colour matching is the lack of a means to reproduce colour impressions accurately enough using physical colour values. With special-effect pigments mixed into the paint, whose metallic or pearl lustre effect varies under different lighting and from different viewing angles, the colour can change completely. This effect — known as 'flip-flop' — causes a colour such as copper red to change to green.