Railway liveries

On 30/08/2006 17:35, na said,

Do you have a pre-grouping colour-calibrated monitor? :-)

I've got one of those. It requires the wearing of rose-tinted spectacles.

(kim)

"na" wrote

I think you would find such a resource to be a waste of time, as all monitors reproduce colour differently.

John.

Not necessarily - I'm a keen photog and have a calibrated set-up. I'm only interested in getting a good idea of the colours, not in matching paint for painting a model - I could buy the paint for that! Jim

kim skrev i diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

Actually this is perfectly possible if you use a mac along with a colour calibration kit. Beowulf

So if I sent you a pic you would see excatly what I See or would you see it the way you want to see images.

Depends on your scanner calibration I should think - You can set monitors to produce accurate colours but it is still subject to GIGO

Mike

Does anybody actually have a helpful answer or is smartass the correct dress code today? Jim the Grumpy

Can not remember the chaps name (Nigel something Digby?) but he has done a series of 40 articles in British Railway Modelling mag with colour illustrations - Point being this will be released as a book at some point, which gives you 40 colour illustrations - He has done a lot of research, should be an interesting book - He did have a web site on which there were thumbnails of some of the liveries but as I cannot remember his name I cannot offer much to search for.

I think te answers _are_ helpful. They all add up to "It's unlikely you'll see the correct colours, as what's displayed on your monitor depends entirely on the quality of the input images - and what guarantee is there that such a site (if it existed) would have accurately reproduced colours?" The swatches would have to be photographed, and as a photog you know there is no such thing as "correct" reproduction of photographed colours, be it with film or digital sensor.

That being said, search for the individual railways. For some of them, the webmasters have done their best to provide good colour samples and liveries.

I don't think anyone has done Pantone definitions for the old railway colours. You'd have to find "close enough" colours and use their definitions. That's a whole different subject, though.

Good luck.

Beowulf wrote: [...]

use a mac along with a colour

A calibrated monitor will merely display the same apple green for example, as another calibrated monitor displaying the same image file will display. That's all. It's not at all the same thing as displaying the correct shade of apple green, as desired by OP.

The colours will be no more accurate than the original images. That's the real problem. It's not just a matter of calibrating the scanner, for example - what guarantee is there that the image to be scanned shows the correct colours? If a swatch (or locomotive) is photographed, the colour information stored in the film or the digital file depends on so many factors beyond your control that it's irrelevant whether your monitor is calibrated or not - the image will almost certainly be "incorrect" in some way.

That is, assuming we agree on what we mean by "correct colour reproduction." For me, it means "showing pretty close to what I saw/would have seen had I been there." However, the same patch of paint will look different in different weathers and lighting. Films and digital cameras will store different combinations of the colour information in the light they capture - and none of those data are the same as what the human visual system captures.

Suppose you've calibrated your digital camera using a standard colour card, and made sure that the image your calibrated monitor displays matches the card. Now, make sure that whenever you make an image with that camera you will have exactly the same lighting conditions as you did when you calibrated it...

"It's all rather confusing, really."

Nigel Burkin ??? perhaps

Wasn't the world black & white back then?

Adrian

Don't know about railway colours specifically, but does this help?

For those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are in the all-yellow strip - John Motson

There is always the Humbrol chart Get it while you can

European railways specify their paint colours according the RAL list.