Is paint mixing not a common service at US hardware stores? An odd question to ask on Blender Artists.
I've been experimenting with mixing live footage with scenes created in Blender. As part of this, I wanted to try chroma keying. I looked up the color usually used for green screens. Most people seem to agree that it's Pantone 354 C.
If you try to buy green screen paint, you'll find it's quite expensive, e.g. ROSCO Chroma Key costs around US$100 per gallon (~3.8L).
As this is quite a lot, you can find many blog posts, etc. where people have compared standard hardware store paints to find something cheaper. A popular winner is Disney Gamma Sector Green (apparently available from Home Depot).
But the ΔE between Gamma Sector Green and Pantone 354 C is almost 12, i.e. very noticeably different (see Zachary Schuessler's guide to Delta E).
So, I was curious why there's so much talk about using off-the-shelf colors like Gamma Sector Green when most hardware stores in Europe will mix you any color you want. Is this one of those odd things where a common service in one part of the world isn't available elsewhere?
Hi-tech machines that mix the color that you choose are a standard part of any hardware store in the parts of Europe where I've lived. You can even bring along an item that's the color you want and they'll scan it and mix that color for you.
This afternoon, I went off and got some paint, for green screen use, mixed for me. The one issue I ran into was that while the machines are obviously capable of mixing any color, it turns out you can't just give them an RGB or CMYK color code. They want you to specify a color code from a classic color fan like this:
Many paint manufacturers have their own proprietary codes. And unsurprisingly, the somewhat odd luminous green that is chroma key green isn't the kind of color they typically include in their palettes of colors that are supposed to look nice on your wall.
Luckily, there are a number of standards - in Europe, there's the NCS 1950 standard and the older RAL color standard. My local hardware store would mix colors specified using either standard. In the US, there appears to be something similar - AMS-STD-595 but it just seems to be used for US government procurement - I don't see any sign that it's used by hardware stores, etc.
So I got some NCS S 1070-G10Y mixed for me - this is the nearest NCS color to Pantone 354 C. With a ΔE of just under 3, it's significantly closer than the Gamma Sector Green mentioned above. The nearest RAL color is RAL 6038 with a much higher ΔE of 4.9 (but still way better than the ~12 of Gamma Sector Green).
As well as choosing the color, these services also allow you to choose:
- The purpose - you're going to want quite a different paint if you're painting a bathroom wall or a wooden box or something outdoors.
- The finish - going from high to low sheen (with names like silk, soft sheen, matt, and flat matt). For chroma keying, you want the lowest sheen possible. Unfortunately, this is much less popular when it comes to home decorating than high sheen (silk) so, the nearest my local hardware store would offer was silk matte. However, I know some stores do offer flat matt (as well as being less popular as a finish, it's apparently also less popular because it's less hard-wearing than silkier paints).