Need a little help color matching

[David Schwab]

The ones from GP-USA are more yellowish, not pink at all, but not really yellow; more like a color you'd expect to see on the inside of a pie, which is what I suspect it should be if it's a cream bobbin?

-Rob

They are all fugly if you ask me. I hate "cream" plastic hardware. The off-white and white stuff is OK.

[David King]

What about buying all white and then RIT dyeing it to match? You might have to scuff the surface with 2000 grit or 0000 steel wool first.

[rhgwynn]

What about buying all white and then RIT dyeing it to match? You might have to scuff the surface with 2000 grit or 0000 steel wool first.

I tried using a really hot and concentrated tea, and it did very little. Havent tried coffee but, does a customer really want a pickup that smells like it (if they dont like coffee - or maybe they will think you spilled it all over the thing - LOL).

-Rob

[big_teee]

I tried using a really hot and concentrated tea, and it did very little. Havent tried coffee but, does a customer really want a pickup that smells like it (if they dont like coffee - or maybe they will think you spilled it all over the thing - LOL).

-Rob

They make some paints for plastic.
It sticks well, but you need to let it dry for a week or so.
I've experimented with it some for my own personal plastic parts, and projects.
I tried the staining and dying with no luck.
T

[Lyrebird Steve]

I tried using a really hot and concentrated tea, and it did very little. Havent tried coffee but, does a customer really want a pickup that smells like it (if they dont like coffee - or maybe they will think you spilled it all over the thing - LOL).

-Rob

Brown Shoe polish. Wipe on/off with a cloth like this guy
How To Relic Strat Pickguard & Knobs - YouTube

Or coffee ...
Fender Plastic Relic - YouTube

[David King]

RIT dye is actually better for this than coffee despite that you see on teh interwebs. Trust me. Pick up an assortment of colors for $1.99 at any grocery store. Start mixing and matching and dipping strips of paper until you think you are close. Let it cool from a boil to 160º or whatever your plastic can handle. Do a 30 second dip and pull the parts out with tongs. You must scuff and degrease your parts thoroughly to get even penetration. It may take multiple dips depending on the concentration. Different plastics will respond differently so take notes.

To do multiple parts at once insert wooden dowel stubs into the backs of the parts and string the dowels together so you can suspend the parts and pull them all out together.

[copperheadroads]

RIT dye is actually better for this than coffee despite that you see on teh interwebs. Trust me. Pick up an assortment of colors for $1.99 at any grocery store. Start mixing and matching and dipping strips of paper until you think you are close. Let it cool from a boil to 160º or whatever your plastic can handle. Do a 30 second dip and pull the parts out with tongs. You must scuff and degrease your parts thoroughly to get even penetration. It may take multiple dips depending on the concentration. Different plastics will respond differently so take notes.

To do multiple parts at once insert wooden dowel stubs into the backs of the parts and string the dowels together so you can suspend the parts and pull them all out together.

Sounds interesting

[rhgwynn]

Brown Shoe polish. Wipe on/off with a cloth like this guy
How To Relic Strat Pickguard & Knobs - YouTube

Or coffee ...
Fender Plastic Relic - YouTube

I like the comment at the top of that coffee one.... "how much did you charge to dunk some plastic into your old coffee?"

If it were me, and no Tee - I havent done this! Warning! Theoretical! - I would put it in hot hot coffee, which should cause the pores (nearly all plastic is porous) to expand, so when they contract during the slow cooling process, the stain should (THEORETICALLY ) set in a little harder, more permanently.

-Rob

[JGundry]

Come on guys, the bobbins are opaque. it has nothing to do with the wire inside! Everyone take a deep breath and listen to what you are saying! lol

You aren't shining a light from the inside on either the full or empty bobbin.

Clearly you have natural light coming in on the left, and incandescent light on the right. So the left side is bluish and the right side looks more yellow.

Here's the pickup on the left and the other cream bobbin with the white points corrected, so that the wood in the background looks the same.

Click to see it larger.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]22544[/ATTACH]

It's just an optical illusion. Like this one:

You have to have the lighting the same on each bobbin, with one light source to capture true colors, and then you have to haver the white point on your camera set for thew temperature of that light source.

This illustration is deceptive. This illustrates differences in color saturation of the same color. Of course the same color is darker in shadow than in direct light. But the cube of the same color does not have the lower saturation it should have for being in shadow. So we see it as a different color when seen relative to the the other colors in shadow. So they really are not the same color. If you had this cube in hand and rotated the shadow side into direct lite it would not have the same reflective density.

[David Schwab]

This illustration is deceptive. This illustrates differences in color saturation of the same color. Of course the same color is darker in shadow than in direct light. But the cube of the same color does not have the lower saturation it should have for being in shadow. So we see it as a different color when seen relative to the the other colors in shadow. So they really are not the same color. If you had this cube in hand and rotated the shadow side into direct lite it would not have the same reflective density.

It's the same color on the screen. That's the point. These are not real objects.

Same with this. The A square looks darker than the B square. But it isn't.



If you open either image in Photoshop and take a measurement of the RGB color in those squares, they are the same color. But your eye doesn't see it that way because of the shadow.

So I used these for examples because of the photo of the two cream bobbins where the one on the left was being illuminated by natural light, so it had a blue cast. It made the two bobbins look like they were different colors, but they are the same.

In the graphics world you never trust your eyes when doing color correction, unless it's for just getting an image to look better. But if you have to match a color you have to do it by the numbers. Also most people's computer monitors are not calibrated, especially on Windows PCs. They are often too blue looking. This is becoming less common with flat panel monitors, but still, I have to calibrate them when doing color corrections.

[JGundry]

You are confusing color temperature differences with a parlor trick. The shadow parlor trick is pointless as an illustration because our brain is smart enough to know that the colors really are different in density and saturation when in shadow. It is coincidental that the density of the checker board illustration is the same, the white swatch in shadow could easily be darker with contrastier lighting. Color corrections are done by eye under calibrated daylight booths and transparency light tables when shot they used to be shot on film. You white balance digitally but final print color checks and tweaks are always done by eye ultimately. I have been doing commercial photography for 18 years or so.

[Joe Gwinn]

Both things can be happening at the same time. To compare bobbin colors, they need to be side by side in the center of a neutral gray background, with uniform diffuse illumination.

And the eye doesn't make for a very good light meter: Optical illusion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[David Schwab]

You are confusing color temperature differences with a parlor trick.

No I'm not. Go back and read the thread from the beginning. They were confusing white point differences for the bobbins being translucent. In the photo above the two cream bobbins looked like they were different hues. I pointed out that it was all the lighting, which is the same thing with the other images, which I used as an illustration on how the eye is tricked. Their eyes were also tricked because of the lighting differences.

I did color correction for print for a living for many years (originally doing dot etching in the early 80s). It's not daylight calibrated when you are doing it for print and on a computer monitor. You have to get your whites to look like paper as seen in incandescent lighting, which is slightly more yellow (white point = D50), because that's what you are printing on. That's how all the Mac monitors I have worked on are calibrated. Color assessment light boxes are usually D50/5000 K for print work, but often also have the standard artificial daylight (D65/6500K) setting.

The differences in that image of the two cream bobbins showed how D65(ish) on the left made it look bluer than the D50(ish) on the right.