Study of color characteristics of pigments and paints by spectrophotometer

Nowadays, in restoring and examining paintings, the search for effective analytical methods for studying paint pigments is very actual. The identification of poor pigments is important itself, but it is also important for the determination of pigments in paints with different binders. Many studies were done in this field by means of Raman and IR Fourier spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and some others. However, all the mentioned methods require the use of complex and expensive equipment, sampling, and preparation of samples. For this reason, the search for new simple non-destructive, and inexpensive testing methods is still very actual. In this work for studying color characteristics of pigments, the spectrophotometry method was used. In the experiments, the color characteristics of model samples were studied. It was shown that the color characteristics of pigments and paints, including, for example, whitewash (lead, zinc, and titanium), have characteristic individual values of the color coordinates L*a*b* that may be used for their identification.