COLOR Florian Vecsey I Dise単o 3 I April 2010
DIRECTORY COLOR THEORY COLOR SPACES COLOR CHANNELS COLOR TEMPERATURES COLOR SYSTEM COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS COLOR IN THE BRAIN REFERENCES
P. 02 / 03 P. 04 / 05 P. 06 P. 07 P. 08 / 09 P. 10 P. 11 P. 12
COLOR THEORY The first typeface was designed by Johann Gutenberg, for his movable type press. Books were all hand-lettered at the time, and Gutenberg wanted to create a faster way to produce books that looked hand-lettered. He designed his type in the style of the Gothic blackletter at the time, so that his printed books would look hand-lettered. As more printing shops opened up, printers began to look at other lettering styles to use as models for typefaces. More thought was put into creating typefaces, and this gave rise to the art of typographic design.
COLOR SPACES RGB The foundations of pre-20th-century color theory were built around “pure” or ideal colors, characterized by sensory experiences rather than attributes of the physical world. This has led to a number of inaccuracies in traditional color theory principles that are not always remedied in modern formulations.[citation needed] The most important problem has been a confusion between the behavior of light mixtures, called additive color, and the behavior of paint or ink or dye or pigment mixtures, called subtractive color. This problem arises because the absorption of light by material substances follows different rules from the perception of light by the eye. A second problem has been the failure to describe the very important effects of strong luminance (lightness) contrasts in the appearance of surface colors (such as paints or inks) as opposed to light colors; „colors“ such as grays, browns or ochres cannot appear in light mixtures. Thus, a strong lightness contrast between a mid valued yellow paint and a surrounding bright white makes the yellow appear to be green or brown, while a strong brightness contrast between a rainbow and the surrounding sky makes the yellow in a rainbow appear to be a fainter yellow or white. A third problem has been the tendency to describe color effects holistically or categorically, for example as a contrast between „yellow“ and „blue“ conceived as generic colors, when most color effects are due to contrasts on three relative attributes that define all colors:
An RGB color space is any additive color space based on the RGB color model. A particular RGB color space is defined by the three chromaticities of the red, green, and blue additive primaries, and can produce any chromaticity that is the triangle defined by those primary colors. The complete specification of an RGB color space also requires a white point chromaticity and a gamma correction curve
04
CMYK The CMYK color model (process color, four color) is a subtractive color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black. Though it varies by print house, press operator, press manufacturer and press run, ink is typically applied in the order of the abbreviation.
HSL/HSV HSL and HSV are the two most common cylindrical-coordinate representations of points in an RGB color model, which rearrange the geometry of RGB in an attempt to be more perceptually relevant than the cartesian representation. They were developed in the 1970s for computer graphics applications, and are used for color pickers, in color-modification tools in image editing software, and less commonly for image analysis and computer vision.
COLOR CHANNELS
COLOR TEMPERATURES The distinction between warm and cool colors has been important since at least the late 18th century [1] but is generally not remarked in modern color science or colorimetry.[citation needed] The contrast, as traced by etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary, seems related to the observed contrast in landscape light, between the „warm“ colors associated with daylight or sunset and the „cool“ colors associated with a gray or overcast day. Warm colors are often said to be hues from red through yellow, browns and tans included; cool colors are often said to be the hues from blue green through blue violet, most grays included. There is historical disagreement about the colors that anchor the polarity, but 19th century sources put the peak contrast between red orange and greenish blue. This concept is related to the color temperature of „visible light“, an important consideration in photography, television and desktop publishing. The determination of whether a color appears warm or cool is relative. Any color can be made to appear warm or cool by its context with other colors.
COLOR SYSTEM The distinction between warm and cool colors has been important since at least the late 18th century [1] but is generally not remarked in modern color science or colorimetry.[citation needed] The contrast, as traced by etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary, seems related to the observed contrast in landscape light, between the „warm“ colors associated with daylight or sunset and the „cool“ colors associated with a gray or overcast day. Warm colors are often said to be hues from red through yellow, browns and tans included; cool colors are often said to be the hues from blue green through blue violet, most grays included. There is historical disagreement about the colors that anchor the polarity, but 19th century sources put the peak contrast between red orange and greenish blue. This concept is related to the color temperature of „visible light“, an important consideration in photography, television and desktop publishing. The determination of whether a color appears warm or cool is relative. Any color can be made to appear warm or cool by its context with other colors.
CO
COLOR SYSTE
OLOR SYSTEM M
COMPLEMENTARY COLORS Complementary colors are pairs of colors that are of “opposite” hue in some color model. The exact hue “complementary” to a given hue depends on the model in question, and perceptually uniform, additive, and subtractive color models, for example, have differing complements for any given color.
COLOR IN THE BRAIN While the mechanisms of color vision at the level of the retina are welldescribed in terms of tristimulus values (see above), color processing after that point is organized differently. A dominant theory of color vision proposes that color information is transmitted out of the eye by three opponent processes, or opponent channels, each constructed from the raw output of the cones: a red-green channel, a blue-yellow channel and a black-white „luminance“ channel. This theory has been supported by neurobiology, and accounts for the structure of our subjective color experience. Specifically, it explains why we cannot perceive a „reddish green“ or „yellowish blue,“ and it predicts the color wheel: it is the collection of colors for which at least one of the two color channels measures a value at one of its extremes. The exact nature of color perception beyond the processing already described, and indeed the status of color as a feature of the perceived world or rather as a feature of our perception of the world, is a matter of complex and continuing philosophical dispute (see qualia).
REFERENCES Weblinks:
Books:
www.wikipedia.org www.color.org www.colorsontheweb.com
A book of colors (Shigenobu Kobayashi)
Florian Vecsey I Dise単o 3 I Mars 2010