Why Opacity of Paint is Serious Matter of Concern?

Painting your home is the most liked task. You are creating a personal space for yourself. But there are certain limitations when we take home painting task in our hands. Professional painters understand the properties of colours very well. For instance, choosing a light colour layer over a dense and dark colour would be the silliest decision to be made. Professional painters will make you realise about the opacity of the paint that strongly impacts our choice for applications.

If the opacity of the paint is too low, you need to apply several coats. This not only makes the task tedious but expensive as well. Here is when we need to consider the opacity of the paint while choosing the one.

There are different properties of paint like viscosity, transparency and opacity, etc. that impacts the final texture of the application. Out of all these, opacity is one such property that is important to consider for domestic painting task. As over the years, our colour choices change, and trends also get changed.

When we talk about opacity, we are talking about the amount of light that particular is liquid allowing to pass. If we apply low opacity paint, it makes background paint clearly visible and the end result will vary from what we have expected.

How to measure the opacity?

It is critical to measure the amount of light a liquid is allowing to pass. For such measurements, colorimeters are used. This instrument works on the principle of Beer Lambert’s law. The photosensitive components are used that measures the transmittance of light. To measure the colour opacity, the paint is applied to the surface and then measured using a colorimeter. Due to appropriate aperture radius, there is a complete barring of the light interference from the surroundings.

Why is Opacity measurement important?

Well, for domestic applications, it really does not matter if the opacity is low or high. But when it comes to commercial applications like automobile painting, it is a serious concern. This is why colour managers in automotive industry are obsessed with the opacity of the paints. In this industry, everything is standardised. Any discrepancy in the material would lead to straightway rejection of the consignment. This not only results in revenue loss but also brings negative reputation to the company.

Testronix is the leading manufacturer and supplier of colorimeters, offering different models. Depending upon different industrial requirements, multiple models are designed.