Nothing fancy

Don:

The process used to do the matching was nothing fancy. We painted samples from each paint bottle onto white business cards and compared them to Floquil / Pollyscale paint chips under 3000K lights. The Floquil / Pollyscale chips often came from the card that was included in the latest Floquil painting miniatures guide from the 1980s, which has real paint chips for almost 100 colors.

If there was no match, then we mixed colors to get something closer.

So it's the old mark I eyeball. If it looked like a dead-ringer then it's an "exact match", otherwise it was "close".

In some cases, if there was some colors that looked really close, we would use the RGB formulas on this site to help tie-break which colors were closer:

http://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Enamel/Floquil/Floquil-Railroad.html
http://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Metal/Testors/Model-Master/Testors-Model-Master.html
http://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Airbrush/Badger/ModelFlex-Railroad/Badger-ModelFlex-Railroad.html

As much as possible, we matched actual paint samples rather than rely on color charts or the online samples above, because they can be off quite a bit to actual paint, we've found. In a few cases we've found we got some bad paints and had to retest to get a better color - when that has happened, we have issued corrections to the book at the updates link in the front of the book.

Eyes at work

Joe --

Thanks for the info on matching and, especially, for including the links.  Good thing your eyes are better than mine at color matching.  < g>

Don

Have you compared your results to those at other color temps?

I prefer 5000K for a variety of reasons and wonder how well the matches hold up under different color temperatures.