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(eng): Various industries are striving for novel, more reliable but still efficient approaches to coatings characterization. Majority of industrial applications use portable instruments for characterization of effect coatings. They typically capture a limited set of in-plane geometries and have limited ability to reliably characterize gonio-apparent behavior typical for such coatings. The instruments rely mostly on color and reflectance characteristics without using a texture information across the coating plane. In this paper, we propose image-based method that counts numbers of effective pigments and their active area. First, we captured appearance of eight effect coatings featuring four different pigment materials, in in-plane and out-of-plane geometries. We used a gonioreflectometer for fixed viewing and varying illumination angles. Our analysis has shown that the proposed method is able to clearly distinguish pigment materials and coating applications in both in-plane and out-of-plane geometries. Finally, we show an application of our method to analysis of spatial non-uniformity, i.e. cloudiness or mottling, across a coated panel.