If you take your car to the auto body shop to have a dent or ding fixed and the fixed area color matched you most likely will not be able to see any color difference around the fixed area and the rest of your car when the work is finished and you pick up your car.

If you go to the paint store and hand over a color chip the person behind the counter will scan the color or check the color number and be able to mix a new can of paint that will be the color you’re looking for. Body shops have the same type program.

If you go order a custom surfboard and say I’d like the board color to be a medium green you most likely will not get the color you asked for. Why is that?

Well first off, what is medium green? What you see in your head as medium green most likely is not the medium green the guy that mixes colors sees in his head. And, without a color sample the person that mixes colors has no idea what you think is medium green or what ever color you ask for.

So it’s a good idea to pass along a color sample of what color you’d like your board to be with your board order so that at least the person that mixes colors can get an idea of what you’d like. But keep in mind that the lam shop that does the color work on your board, whether the plan is for a spray color or color lamination, does not have an expensive computer color matching program to get exact color matches.

In fact the only program the lam shop has is a bunch of different water base colors for spray jobs or a bunch of different pigment colors for color lams. And the way colors get mixed is by hand, trial and error, until the color that gets mixed is close to the color being asked for. Sometimes they come out real close to the exact color and sometimes they don’t. It all depends on the color. Some colors are good right out of the pigment jar. Some colors need to be mixed with a touch of three or four different colors and getting the right blend is almost impossible. And to think that the person mixing the color is not paid by the hour but takes extra time to work up a color match?

Keep in mind that if you email a color sample the color you see on your computer screen may not be the color the gets printed on the other end for a color sample hard copy. Colors do get lost in translation… in more ways than one.

D.R.