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Scott's out doing the fun stuff again, so I'll field the questions for him.

He carries a boat-load of samples with him in the back of his truck. He has over 20 samples cut roughly 18" square stored side-by-side in an enclosed black plastic tool bin - the $50 Home-Depot variety. He separates the samples with 1/4" pink insulation foam to ensure they're not vibrating against each other. This job was sold off colors from a sample of green thin stamp with black acid stain, and the texture was sold off a similar looking troweled sample.

For the taped lines, light chocolate was the skim coat color, then 1/2" fiber tape was applied, then another coat of light chocolate build coat was applied over the tape to ensure no bleed through. Finish coat was applied the same day as the build coat, and tape was removed 24 hrs later after all staining was complete. Lines on this one pulled nice and straight. Getting the surface nice and wet with numerous coats of stain, ammonia, water, & ultrastone helped. Some times you'll get more jagged lines, but as long as it's consistent throughout, it's never an issue.

As far as the troweling goes, to get a smooth finish...and this takes some practice....trowel out a small area, just to distribute material somewhat evenly at first leaving plenty of extra material everywhere. Let it sit there for a minute or 2 and let it lose the surface moisture a bit. Then trowel smooth as possible with a rather flat trowel angle, maintaining a random stroke pattern. Best to have one guy placing thin finish and another guy coming behind him a few minutes later to smooth finish it. Guys have a hard time trying to trowel thin finish smooth because they're typically trying to trowel the material too wet. They basically just pull the material from one spot to another and struggle to flatten it out. Letting it sit and dehydrate a bit first ensures you're not pulling tf with your final trowel strokes, just smoothing the top. A floor maintainer / buffer with a 100 grit sanding screen the next day knocks off all the high spots and smooths it out nicer.

4:1 is 4 parts water to 1 part ultrastone.
Color is added at the equivalent of 3 oz PC to 128 oz (gallon) of ultrastone. In this case, they mixed 24 oz of ultrastone and half an oz. (1 and a half PC bottle caps full) of Portion Control, then added 96 oz. of water. This didn't have a drastic effect on the color of the floor, just blended the colors a bit and added some desert beige highlights.