10: Light & Color
In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light — Hans Hoffman
This chapter is about light itself and our perception of light in terms of brightness and color. The chapter covers:
- light in terms of electro-magnetic radiation and mixtures of light as continuous spectra
- a brief introduction to colorimetry, the science of color perception, human trichromatic color perception and how colors can be represented in various color spaces.
- a number of advanced topics such as color constancy, gamma correction, and an example concerned with distinguishing different colored objects in an image.
General
- Charles Poynton’s FAQs on color and gamma
- CIE
- ITU recommendations for television
- Newton’s papers on Opticks
- Pantone colors by number (archived)
- Subset of Pantone colors with RGB, XYZ values (archived)
- Visualizing the XYZ Color Space, (YouTube video)
- Color Vision, Craig Blackwell (YouTube video series)
- Optical illusions show how we see, Beau Lotto (TED), about color and seeing, some great examples of color constancy
- Color Vision, Peter Gouras
- Web Vision, comprehensive online resource to the organization of the retina and visual system
- Bayer filter patent, for Color Imaging Array by Bruce Bayer (Eastman Kodak)
- The CIE XYZ and xyY Color spaces, by Douglass Kerr (Stanford)
- Pantone colour chart
- Color constancy, research site on illuminant estimation
- CVonline, compendium of computer vision (University of Edinburgh)
Software
- Colorlab Toolbox for Matlab (archived), (University of Eastern Finland)
- Colorspace transformations in Matlab, (Pascal Getreuer)
- Color space tools in Java (archived), (Brown University)
- Colour, open-source color science library for Python
Spectral data
- ASTER Spectral Library, (NASA)
- Spectral database, (University of Eastern Finland)
- CIE and spectral data, (Munsell Color Science Lab, RIT)
- GretagMacbeth ColorChecker®
- Cone response, CIE functions, (CVRL at University College London)
- Spectral color research, University of Eastern Finland; spectral databases
Color blindness
- Are you colorblind?
- Lots of resources related to colorblindness
- Color Blindness, Craig Blackwell (YouTube video series)
These links are kept in one place for every edition and checked monthly. Resources for every chapter.