With the growth of Metallic & Pearlescent application in the automotive mass production, there was a rising need of an easiest way of color matching.

Until 1994 the only way to read colors was using single-angle and sphere spectrophotometers, together as well with a trained human eye; unfortunately, due to the characteristic of M&P paints, this system is not anymore sufficient to give the right color matching results.

From 1995, with the introduction of the multi-angle spectrophotometer, it seemed that life could become easier: multi-angle spectrophotometers can read from 15° to 110° giving better results to color matching. Still, to finalize colors and prepare the panels, paint producers need to apply visual matching, keeping a low rate production and involving lot of time to create the right samples to go on with.

Finally today with CI NAVIGATOR, we have a new color matching system applied to anisotropic color appearance model and image processing calculation. In measurement dialog, operator measures multi-angle reflectance spectrum, and if customer requires high quality matching, read
panel image by scanner or CCD digital microscope. CI-Navigator System calculates by use reflectance or reflectance and pixel information.

The advantages in using this software are the following:

Concerning applications, the main fields of interest are: Color Laboratory, OEM paint, Refinishing paint.