Evaluating the Graininess Attribute by Visual Scaling for Coatings with Special-Effect Pigments

In our society, objects’ visual appearance is an essential factor because it allows us to recognize and differentiate one object from another. In different industrial sectors like cosmetics, textiles and automotive, special-effect pigments are largely used to achieve attractive visual features. These pigments provide a color change with viewing and illumination direction, and visually provide texture. Depending on a finish’s properties, and also on the viewing and illumination conditions, coatings exhibit sparkle or a graininess-like texture. Currently, not many scientific works on the visual perception of these texture effects can be found in the literature. In addition, choice of experimental method can influence the measurement scale obtained from visual data. For this reason, the purpose of this work was to analyze graininess visual scaling constructed by two different psychophysical methods. The experimental design was based on the rank-order and paired-comparison methods. The data analysis was conducted by following the law of comparative judgments to obtain a visual scale of the graininess attribute to compare it to instrumental data. A good correlation appeared between both magnitudes with a correlation coefficient close to 0.9. Both methods provided useful results with a reasonable correspondence between them, which ensures that data can be considered reliable, while the visual obtained scale can act as a good graininess scale perceived by the human visual system.