Being in the business, I have an awareness of some nuances of colour perception that perhaps others are not party to.
Given the prolific numbers of photographs of Royal Navy capital ships in black and white photographs which
appear to be in a medium grey, it is understandable why so many were willing to believe the existence of a lighter "507B".
Please forgive the somewhat-less-than-corporate look of the following. I have left these uncropped and very amateurish looking to hopefully demonstrate a point and to convince anyone who perhaps doesn't quite believe that a medium grey by whatever name was not in widespread use.
The shape of cones in the human eye is not uniform. A consistent feature of the human eye is that looking at a small colour swatch in the centre of our vision will always appear darker than observing it at a wider range of viewing angles. This is not the same as scale-fade or anything like that. Just that a 5cm x 5cm swatch of colour will look darker than a whole object painted in that same shade which reflects that frequency of light onto the different shaped cones further from the centre of our eyes.
With a relatively dark shade like Home Fleet Grey, this is exaggerated when displayed against a completely unnatural background such as a white card.
This very issue has inspired some empassioned debate amongst our little group of research contributors!
The following is one of 6 test cards I made around October last year, made by cutting up painted post-card sized samples into 6 pieces. I kept one at home. Four went to those individuals assisting me, and the last one is kept at our Colourcoats factory. Our 13%RF Home Fleet Grey is now ready to go on sale
I used some left over paint in the lid-spraying airbrush to (very!) roughly paint a modest sized piece of MDF board. I then (very!) roughly sprayed a black faux "boot topping" on the bottom to give us some reference that we are all used to seeing on the old photographs. Just to prove I'm not cheating - here is the swatch used to match the production model paint against the 30-second concourse paint job on the MDF board:
Now, look at this. Down sun, up sun and across sun.
If you're not convinced now that Home Fleet Grey was
the paint used extensively on British warships in the Home Fleet from 1936 to 1941 prior to disruptive pattern camouflage becoming de rigour, then I don't think we can be friends any more
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