Matt makes many excellent points, especially the AK book primer issue.
A prior forum member who stated he’d had association with AK mention at minimum there was a lack of due diligence with that work.
Even Camera’s from today can lie on occasion. This same camera, same cup, same settings, indoors and same photographer.
Light sources are different.
Right! The Blue/Gold dress conundrum.
I presume that you mean black and white photos that have been colorized by somebody with a computer. That is very true that those photos are indeed variations of guesswork. Some educated, some not so much, some purely a wild guess. And even the best researched ones have a hard time matching old original color photos.
Brown was used till just before the French campaign. Order stoppingit came down prior to, but I’m sure some still had brown in France. The contrast between dunkelgrau and dunkelbrown was real low and photos look single color. (Like RAL 8000 and RAL 7008 in North Africa / Southern Russia. German Armor Camouflage (panzerworld.com)
Thank you for the information and links, Wade! A lot of my searches pass through Missing Lynx. The second website offers a little more information than what I had in my notes.
Thank you for that recommendation!
My small reference library does not include much useful information on colors. What I do have is all for World War II German vehicles. I continue to rely heavily on paint research and formulations suggested by people like Mike Starmer and Steve Zaloga.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget to add a touch of blue to your dunkel grau ……
Ohhh…Now that’s another can of worms! 
Yeah it is lol I’m just breaking balls!
The topic that keeps on giving…
Playing with the same pic as Tim, but manipulating saturation, colour and contrast:
The ‘original’ green tinged, ‘hot pink’ of the topic photo for easy comparison
Why have I done this? Because this is exactly what people do with pictures on web sites, archives and publishing. Evidence?:
Nice…but I still don’t see anything that resembles brown.
BTW…do I detect a slight hint of blue in that Dunklegrau? 
That could cause natural born Panzer Police everywhere to have a B@tt-H*le stroke.
…and its funny!
Wade, Leo and Richard. Do you clowns realise that to make grey, you mix red, yellow and BLUE, then add black or white to change the shade… 
Yeah, just call me Bozo… 
or you can call me Larry, Curly, Shep or Moe, whichever you three don’t want to be called
Back to the Topic (it was here a while ago)
From November 7, 1938 to July 31, 1940 all German AFV’s were painted Nr. 46 Dunkelgrau covering 2/3, Nr. 45 Dunkelbraun covering 1/3.
I’ve always been partial to shep ……
*opening the thread, wanting to repeat that 251s delivered to the 1. Panzer before Fall Weiss were not camouflaged. Seeing the discussion about fotography. Slooowly closing the thread again and moving on with my life…
Re-opening this can of wriggly, messy worms, just for fun…who makes the best Dunklegrau/German Gray/Panzer Gray paint? And reasons why? 
Best? Color match? Spraying Adhesion?
Speaking of 1939 two tone, Vehicles commissioned in 1939 were painted in the following manner with a base colour – Anthrazitgrau (RAL 7016) – which dominated the camo pattern by 2/3, with soft contours between colours. The second colour was Signalbraun (RAL 8002)
Anyone have additional sources to back that up or refute it?
Anthrazitgrau (RAL 7016) – and Schwartzgrau (RAL 7021) – aka Panzer Grey sometimes get confused but are two different colors.
