Color Change of Printed Surfaces Due to a Clear Coating with Matte Finishing

Abstract

When a clear layer is coated on a diffusing background, light is reflected multiple times within the transparent layer between the background and the air-layer interface. If the background is lit in one point, the angular distribution of the scattered light and Fresnel’s angular reflectance of the interface induce a specific irradiance pattern on the diffuser: a ring-like halo. In the case where the background is not homogenously colored, e.g. a half-tone print, the multiple reflection process induces multiple con-volutions between the ring-like halo and the halftone pattern, which increases the probability for light to meet differently col-ored areas of the background and thus induces a color change of the print. This phenomenon, recently studied in the case of a smooth layer surface (glossy finishing) is extended here to rough surface layer (matte finishing) in order to see the impact of the surface roughness on the ring-like halo, and thereby on the print color change. A microfacet-based bi-directional reflectance dis-tribution function (BRDF) model is used to predict the irradi-ance pattern on the background, and physical experiments have been carried out for verification. They show that the irradiance pattern in the case of a rough surface is still a ring-like halo, and that the print color change is similar to the one observed with a smooth interface, by discarding the in-surface reflections which can induce additional color change.