Abstract: A method for characterizing a coating comprising a pigment and metallic flakes, said method by directing beams of light toward a coating; measuring the reflectance of light from the coating at the specular angle; measuring the reflectance of light from the coating at one or moren on-specular angles; analyzing said measured light at the specular and non-specular angles as a function of wavelength; and determining the K/S of the pigment and the volume fraction of said metal flakes within the coating from the measurements of the specular and non-specular reflectance; wherein K is the absorption cross-section of the pigment multiplied by its volume concentration; and S is the scattering cross-section of the pigment multiplied by its volume concentration.

Abstract: The present invention discloses a method for film archival based upon digitization of dye densities of the film. In particular, by using the analytical densities of the dyes and the dye concentrations at each pixel, the present invention provides a method for determining the color of the particular pixel where such color value is not influenced by aging of the film substrate or chemical degradation of the color dyes used. If the analytical densities of a film are known, then the concentration of each dye can be estimated by measuring the logarithm of the transmission of the film in as few as three frequency bands. The error involved in this digitization is a function of filter bandwidth and a function of the number of spectral transmission measurements used for the dye concentration estimation. The present invention is directly applicable in the field of film restoration and corresponding methods and devices for film restoration are disclosed.