Method for matching a coating of any gloss level

A method for matching a vehicle coating comprising a basecoat and a clearcoat, the method comprising:

• providing a database containing a plurality of records for different basecoats, wherein each record comprises for a combination of one of the different basecoats with a reference clearcoat having a reference gloss value:
• i) a set of reflectance spectra for a plurality of aspecular angles;
• and
• ii) data representative of a paint formulation corresponding to the one basecoat;
• measuring a gloss value and a set of reflectance spectra for a plurality of aspecular angles of the vehicle coating to obtain a measured gloss value and a measured set of reflectance spectra;
• correcting the measured set of reflectance spectra to obtain a corrected set of reflectance spectra,
• wherein the correcting is carried out using gloss correction parameters based on the measured gloss value and the reference gloss value of the reference clearcoat,
• wherein the gloss correction parameters are obtained by mapping
• a first dataset comprising a gloss value and a set of reflectance spectra of each of a plurality of first samples, each first sample consisting of a combination of a first sample basecoat and a first sample clearcoat having a first sample clearcoat gloss value, wherein the plurality of first samples comprises first samples of multiple first sample basecoats, wherein each first sample basecoat is combined with multiple first sample clearcoats each of the multiple first sample clearcoats having a different first sample clearcoat gloss value
• to
• a second dataset comprising a set of reflectance spectra of each of a plurality of second samples, each second sample consisting of a combination of a second sample basecoat with the reference clearcoat having the reference gloss value;
• selecting a candidate basecoat matching the vehicle coating by comparing the corrected set of reflectance spectra with the sets of reflectance spectra contained in the database and selecting, as the candidate basecoat, the basecoat for which the set of reflectance spectra in the database is closest matching the corrected set of reflectance spectra;
• and
• obtaining from the database the data representative of the paint formulation corresponding to the selected candidate basecoat.