Hello!

I've just purchased PaintScratch's touch-up pen (primer, paint and clear coat) and will soon be addressing a few blemishes on my car.  I have two varietes of spots:

• Small stone chips about 1/16" or less.  I can catch my finger nail on them and the exposed coloration below is whiteish.  I am assuming that the clear coat is corrupted and I will need to prime, pain and clear coat. 
  
  
• The other spot is an area that was probably scratched by a car key, I don't know.  The scratch was about 3 inches long and varied in depth.  I was able to manually remove 80% of the scratch with Maguiar's fine cut polish.  After several attempts, I graduated to a medium cut polish.  I applied this maually (finger tip) as with the fine cut.  In retrospect, this probably was not the best thing to do because now the remaining 20% of the scratch has flattened out and widened.  The spot is about 1/2" long and 1/4" or less wide.  It is colored whiteish or grayish.
  

I'm not sure what I am looking at when I see the white/gray.

My questions ---

What is the likely condition of the clear coat for both of these? 

Is ther a way, a standard test, to tell if the clear coat has been damaged? 

Is there a way to tell if there is a base coat of paint beneath the whiteish/grayish spots?

Does a chip tell me that I definitely need to repaint?

I'm asking these because of the way clear coats have been described - or the way I understand them.  For instance, a scratch in the clear coat apparently disrupts its mirroring (shine) so that the human eye sees a "white" scratch instead of the paint below. 

Thanks for any help you have.
Jack

Most often if the clearcoat is damaged it is best to also repaint the underlying basecoat.

Please see: https://www.paintscratch.com/touch-up-paint-directions/