How the Color Matching Auto Paint Process Works

Has your car been involved in a fender bender? Is the paint beginning to peel? Is the body showing signs of rust? If any of these are true, your car sounds like it could use a new paint job. No matter what caused your car to need a touch-up of paint, it is necessary for that paint to match the old one. If it doesn’t match, the new paint job will fail to improve the look of your auto.

Here is some information about color paint matching for automobiles. The experts at Pomona Auto Body can get your new paint to match your old color exactly using the following methods.

Use Manufacturers’ Paint

One way to be sure that a new paint job will match the old one is to use the manufacturer’s paint only. The same way a good mechanic would use only OEM parts on your vehicle to get things fixed right, good auto body experts only use manufacturer paint to get the paint perfect. 

There are some instances where the manufacturer will not let the auto body shop know the exact paint information. There are also times they will not sell the original paint to the shop. Since it is not always possible to get the precise paint color, the technicians who do the paint job work extra hard to be sure they come up with new paint to blend with the old. This is what they do when the paint color has been discontinued. 

Paint Matching Technology

If the paint has been discontinued or the manufacturer does not release proprietary information, expert painters will take another step. They will use a tool called a spectrophotometer to decipher how much light exists in a particular paint. This allows the technician to find another paint that emits the same light and thereby ends up looking exactly like the old paint. The technician also takes the VIN information to make sure a new paint color will contain the same formula as the old one.