N
nachoman
For those wishing to make custom white decals, I think I may have stumbled onto something useful. I am trying to make gold lettering to go onto green passenger cars. As others have suggested here, my intent is to print gold letters with a green background onto white decal paper. Ideally, the green background would be the same color green as the green paint I used on the car, and would blend perfectly and only the gold lettering would show through. Before I rushed out to buy white decal paper, I first needed to test to see if I could color match close enough for this to work. My first few attempts to do it by eye were miserable.
I tried taking a digital picture of the passenger car with a digital camera, and copying the color from the image into decal background. That didn't work either. The colors in the digital image didn't match those on the car.
Then I discovered this:
http://www.testors.com/catalog_download.asp
It is the testors' paint catalog, showing all their paint colors. Did you know Floquil and Polly scale are testors brands too? I downloaded the catalog as a pdf, then found the color I used to paint the car. I then used a piece of software that came with my macintosh computer called "art directors toolkit" to examine the RGB data for the "paint chip" for that color. The output gave me the percentages of red, green, and blue for the color on the paint chip. I then went into my test decal background, and created a custom color with the RGB values I obtained. I then printed this on white paper as an experiment, and it matches the painted color of my passenger car quite closely.
I haven't had time to test this on the white decal paper yet, but when I do I will be sure to post pictures of my results. For those of you using a PC, I am sure there is freewhere somwhere that will allow you to do the same thing as the "art directors toolkit". Try searching "color matching" on google.
Kevin
I tried taking a digital picture of the passenger car with a digital camera, and copying the color from the image into decal background. That didn't work either. The colors in the digital image didn't match those on the car.
Then I discovered this:
http://www.testors.com/catalog_download.asp
It is the testors' paint catalog, showing all their paint colors. Did you know Floquil and Polly scale are testors brands too? I downloaded the catalog as a pdf, then found the color I used to paint the car. I then used a piece of software that came with my macintosh computer called "art directors toolkit" to examine the RGB data for the "paint chip" for that color. The output gave me the percentages of red, green, and blue for the color on the paint chip. I then went into my test decal background, and created a custom color with the RGB values I obtained. I then printed this on white paper as an experiment, and it matches the painted color of my passenger car quite closely.
I haven't had time to test this on the white decal paper yet, but when I do I will be sure to post pictures of my results. For those of you using a PC, I am sure there is freewhere somwhere that will allow you to do the same thing as the "art directors toolkit". Try searching "color matching" on google.
Kevin