Scratches, deep gouges or busted fenders are all cosmetic annoyances for car owners. If you want to restore your car to its original condition, it's likely that your car will need to be partially repainted. Spraying the original manufacturer's color onto the car won't work — working with automotive paint is more complicated than that. That's why it's important to find an expert auto body repair shop to find a color match for your car. Here's why you can trust professionals to do an excellent job and restore your car to its original beauty. 

They Understand the Difficulty of Matching Automotive Paint

Cars are assembled from parts manufactured and painted in factories all over the world. Car companies develop colors and send their formulations to the factories in order to maintain a consistent color across the entire car. However, mixing errors and variations in paint due to different versions of sprayer robots, temperature or humidity causes the final color to vary slightly from the intended color. So the color on your car is not likely to perfectly match the manufacturer's formula.

To make things worse, the sun will slowly bleach the paint on your car over time, causing it to turn into a slightly whiter shade. Even if manufacturing errors didn't occur, the original manufacturer color would not match the current color of your car. Altogether, it would be impossible to get a perfect color match based on the manufacturer formula.

They Use High-Tech Technology to Produce the Closest Match

To assist in color matching, auto body shops use a device called a spectrophotometer to precisely measure the hue of your car's color. Your eye perceives color according to the wavelength of light reflected off of a surface. The spectrophotometer is a camera that is placed up against the current paint of your car to measure its wavelength, allowing for a color match to be determined.

The computer then determines how to create a color match in the paint mixer by mixing pigments and tints together to get a nearly exact match. This allows auto body shops to recreate paint that matches the color of your car right in the garage.

They Have Expert Technicians Apply and Blend the Color Match

Even if the color matches exactly, technician skill makes a large difference in the finished paint job. The reason is that temperature, humidity, the spray nozzle used and the angle the paint is sprayed on all effect how the final paint job appears.

In order to correct for this difficulty, a skilled auto body technician will spray the paint onto your car and expertly blend it into adjacent panels. The gradient created makes any slight differences in color unnoticeable to the naked eye, even in different lighting conditions.

Whether you have a deep gouge or an entirely broken bumper, it's important to take your car to an auto body shop that cares about the vehicles it services and employs skilled technicians. Matching automotive paint is a difficult process that involves complicated technology and expert painting skills, and you want your car to look the best once it's restored.