Color Question.

N

Nelsonarchie

Member
Does anyone here know what was the correct shade of the hull colors that the ship would have actually been painted in?

I'm asking because i did a color test using the colors from Bob Read's color guide for the Olympic class:
deftitanic9.jpg


I'm just asking because this is too desaturated and bleached according to some in the shipbucket community.

Anyone got any better approximations or calibrations because i'm not sure about this.
 
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The red on the hull would probably have been Red Lead paint, an anti-fouling paint used on ships below the waterline. The color would (depending on where the pigment was mined) probably be approaching the red of the White Star Line Pennant. I don't know if Red Lead is still available or not. You would probably be fairly close going with the red on the QE II hull or the Queen Mary.

The white color on the superstructure should be like a piece of white printer paper, not the grayish color in your renderings.

"White Star Buff," your guess is as good as anyone's since, IIRC, no reference samples exist to be able to recreate it.

The black and white photos show that the colors on the Titanic appeared to be a gloss finish. That gloss is going to be difficult to reproduce, even printing on glossy paper, because of the degree of gloss or how glossy the item actually was.

There are a couple of other things to consider. The color you see will be dependent on how your monitor shows the colors. If the picture is printed, then it will also be a function of how well the colors are rendered on the printer (how well the printer is calibrated). I did a lot of photography, so I spent probably 8-10 hours calibrating my laptop monitor and the printer to get the color rendition as close to possible to the test images.
 
Gordon Mooneyhan said:
The red on the hull would probably have been Red Lead paint, an anti-fouling paint used on ships below the waterline. The color would (depending on where the pigment was mined) probably be approaching the red of the White Star Line Pennant. I don't know if Red Lead is still available or not. You would probably be fairly close going with the red on the QE II hull or the Queen Mary.

The white color on the superstructure should be like a piece of white printer paper, not the grayish color in your renderings.

"White Star Buff," your guess is as good as anyone's since, IIRC, no reference samples exist to be able to recreate it.

The black and white photos show that the colors on the Titanic appeared to be a gloss finish. That gloss is going to be difficult to reproduce, even printing on glossy paper, because of the degree of gloss or how glossy the item actually was.

There are a couple of other things to consider. The color you see will be dependent on how your monitor shows the colors. If the picture is printed, then it will also be a function of how well the colors are rendered on the printer (how well the printer is calibrated). I did a lot of photography, so I spent probably 8-10 hours calibrating my laptop monitor and the printer to get the color rendition as close to possible to the test images.
Click to expand...
what about the black paint?
 
Gordon Mooneyhan said:
The red on the hull would probably have been Red Lead paint, an anti-fouling paint used on ships below the waterline. The color would (depending on where the pigment was mined) probably be approaching the red of the White Star Line Pennant. I don't know if Red Lead is still available or not. You would probably be fairly close going with the red on the QE II hull or the Queen Mary.

The white color on the superstructure should be like a piece of white printer paper, not the grayish color in your renderings.

"White Star Buff," your guess is as good as anyone's since, IIRC, no reference samples exist to be able to recreate it.

The black and white photos show that the colors on the Titanic appeared to be a gloss finish. That gloss is going to be difficult to reproduce, even printing on glossy paper, because of the degree of gloss or how glossy the item actually was.

There are a couple of other things to consider. The color you see will be dependent on how your monitor shows the colors. If the picture is printed, then it will also be a function of how well the colors are rendered on the printer (how well the printer is calibrated). I did a lot of photography, so I spent probably 8-10 hours calibrating my laptop monitor and the printer to get the color rendition as close to possible to the test images.
Click to expand...
Red Lead Oxide paint is still very much available in the UK anyway.
 
On the Wikipedia page for the SS Nomadic, there is a color photo of the restored tender. The antifouling paint looks to be close to the sample Bob provides here: http://titanic-cad-plans.website/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Titanics-Antifouling-Paint-revised.pdf Given that the photo was taken on an overcast day, I think that accounts for the darker shade. I would say that a place to check would be the group that restored the Nomadic. IIRC, Harland and Wolff did the painting, I wonder if they might have the color formula hiding somewhere.
 
When I was a member of the Titanic Research and Modeling Association back when they were starting to restore Nomadic, we were in contact with the Nomadic Preservation Trust. We hoped that their relationship with Harland and Wolff would yield previously unknown information about paint colors. Unfortunately H&W didn’t have any original documentation so the Trust had to rely on the greater Titanic community for guidance on colors. So, the paint colors you see on Nomadic can’t be considered authoritative in any sense, as much as the general public would like to believe that.
 
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As someone who has studied color a lot, even under the best preservation conditions, paint can fade. It all depends on the paint composition and the environment it is in. Also, in the case of Titanic, basing the color on any photo is problematic. The water changes the colors and the colors do not show up as the true colors in photos. Reds are washed out. So considering that the paint samples we see in the photos do not represent their true colors of the artifacts (they are far redder if you filter out the blue-green color of the water - you can tell because in many of the photos the normally gray/beige silt is green). You can also tell from photos of recovered items on the bottom vs. what they looked like when they were recovered. But unless you filter for the change in color from the water, none of the photos of the wreck have the true color.

In the collection of Titanic photos, there is one (it is featured on Wikipedia) where you can see that they are painting the hull black and you can see that the anti-fouling paint is very dark. This plus how under water photography treats reds indicates that the anti-fouling paint was much darker than the pinkish color suggested by Bob. The photo of the Titanic on the ways does not represent her final colors. She was much darker than that and it is likely that they had not applied the final coat of anti-fouling paint to the hull yet. Also, you can see the Olympic in drydock that her hull is shiny where the photos of the Titanic on the launch ways appears very matt. And in my experiment and research on color correcting under water red, the color should be much darker. I would say the darker of Nelsonarchie's choices. That is what I got from color correcting 3 photos of the remailing red pain on Titanic.

I have also done this with science fiction models where it appears to have been repainted but I found it was not because of a difference in lighting and photography.
 

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