“The Great Dunkelgelb Debate” gets brought up on this site every 6 - 12 months, and indeed Dan you did nothing wrong in asking the question. Someone else will ask again in 6 or so months and everyone will chime in with their own theories / documents / evidence / proof. It’s not a bad thing. Put us all in a pub with a round of beer and it would be even better.
I think the whole debate boils down to two questions:
What color is Dunkelgelb?
Which Model Paint Manufacturer makes the closest match to Dunkelgelb?
IMHO, the answer to question 1 is - There were 4 official versions of Dunkelgelb, documented by RAL cards and numerous historians, which then varied widely in color and tone for all the reasons listed in this thread.
The answer to question 2 is - a) Which Dunkelgelb are you trying to match? and b) While there may be a consensus on what is too light or too dark, everyone has a different eye, and the choice of paint color will ultimately come down to personal taste.
Then there’s weathering, an entirely different topic…
I can feel it coming,
it is coming to me,
a title for a blockbuster movie,
it’s going to be a real mega-hit,
here it comes, hold on tight now
“Fifty shades of Dunkelgelb”
Aahhhh! What a relief, feels much better now …
Interesting in that the DG is a little more toward the Testors end of the spectrum.
For all of this though, I can’t worry too much about what shade I use. Given that I have a few Panther Fs and Panther IIs in the pipeline, it won’t matter much anyway.
Deliberately building these not only for the Almost Could Have Been historical aspect, but I want to relive the fun aspect of modeling when I was a teen and things weren’t as, well, pedantic.
FWIW I don’t really sweat the exact color. I find something reasonably close then lighten it knowing that weathering will usually darken the original color. By the time all the mud, dust, dirt, etc. is laid on you’d be hard pressed to identify the original exact color. Your mileage may vary.
Some, if not all, of these images have been either colorized or otherwise manipulated, that their value for color reference is doubtful. For instance, I’ve seen the same photo of the “Octopus” Tiger with, and without, the Swastika (don’t know if it was photo shopped in, or out). The last two images of the Panther G’s are interesting in that they both have just one Tiger roadwheel in the same location! BTW, are these two Panthers in overall Olivegrun?
I’m not sure but I think those wheels are just steel wheels for the Panther, not tiger wheels, at least for the bottom one. I think the top one may be a tiger wheel, it has the indentation(?, don’t know what else to call it) in the center of the wheel, whereas the Panther steel wheels had a flat surface in the center. I may be wrong though.
My friend, I think those pictures help illustrate the conundrum of color accuracy questions for German WW2 AFV’s.
I’m familiar several of the images from the 1970’s so I doubt those have much in the way of digital color processing but they certainly can have color shift due to film types of the 1940’s, color processing etc. Some of the pictures are lifted from color film shot in 1945 and can be traced to source should someone care enough to follow up.
So this “conundrum “ has been around since at least the 70’s and the modeling world still can’t nail it down? My Lord. Scares relatively new modelers like me. I’ve got literally about 20 bottles of “Dunkelgelb “ from five manufacturers. I guess the best thing to do is mix them up?
