Scribd
Upload
52 views4 pages

Chapter 1

The document discusses the fundamentals of light and color, including electromagnetic radiation, wavelength and frequency, how the human eye perceives color, and the hue, saturation and brightness properties used to describe color. It provides details on these topics at a conceptual level.

Uploaded by

Sherilyn Apostol
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
52 views4 pages

Chapter 1

The document discusses the fundamentals of light and color, including electromagnetic radiation, wavelength and frequency, how the human eye perceives color, and the hue, saturation and brightness properties used to describe color. It provides details on these topics at a conceptual level.

Uploaded by

Sherilyn Apostol
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 4

Chapter 1: Physics of Light and Color

Exploring Color Terms as an Anthropologist

Return to MODULE PAGE Return to VIDEO LAB

by James Stanlaw (Primary Author) and Robert T. Arrigo

Some Fundamentals of Electromagnetic Radiation

Though most people cannot properly define electromagnetic radiation, everyone knows
a great example of this phenomenon... light! Light is electromagnetic radiation, but so
are radio waves (like those of AM/FM stereos), microwaves (useful for heating food),
and X-rays (hopefully you haven't had much exposure to these!). What makes light
rays so different from these other examples of electromagnetic radiation? The short
answer is that we can see light, but we cannot see radio-, micro-, or X-rays.

Wavelength and Frequency

Waves of electromagnetic radiation can by quantified by numerous features, of which


two, wavelength, and frequency, are particularly important. Wavelength is the measure
of the separation of a wave's peaks, or valleys, and is expressed in units of feet,
meters, nanometers, and so on, depending upon the magnitude of the wavelength.
Frequency is a bit harder to grasp. The frequency of a wave is related to the number of
peaks that pass through a given point along a wave's path in one second.

Wavelength and frequency are inversely related � as one goes up, the other goes
down, and vice versa. Light is simply electromagnetic radiation within a certain range of
wavelengths and frequencies that the human eye is capable of detecting. EMR waves
that lie outside of these ranges are undetectable by the human eye. (To humans, the
world seems dark at night, but to rattle snakes and other creatures that can see EMR of
lower energy and longer wavelengths, the world is still very much visible at night.) So,
there is nothing particularly special about light over other EMR phenomena, except
humans can see it!

Some Fundamentals of the Human Eye

The human eye is a pretty amazing biological device. However, the eye is but the
beginning of vision, not the center of it. As you may recall from a biology or anatomy
class, light (electromagnetic radiation) penetrates the eye's translucent cornea, travels
through the pupil and lens, and proceeds through the vitreous (the clear gelatin
material that fills the eye) until it strikes special cells at the back of the eye that can
detect EMR of particular wavelengths. Specifically, two types of cells, cones and rods,
react to EMR of particular wavelengths. Rods are responsible for giving us (limited)
night vision and are able to discern between brighter and darker light sources. Of more
interest to us are cones, which are specialized cells that have three types of
photosensitive proteins on their surfaces. Each type of photosensitive protein is most
easily activated by EMR rays of a particular wavelength, centered around either the red,
green, or blue, portion of the color spectrum. Every cone cell has proteins of each
variety, but, for any given cone cell, one protein will be numerically preeminent, and
thus a cone will react more to red-ish, green-ish, or blue-ish light. The more a beam of
light's wavelength deviates from this concentration point, the weaker the cone's
reaction will be.

Information abut the wavelengths of light detected by rods and cones as well as other
visual information is sent to the rear of the brain in a special area called the primary
visual cortex. It is here (among other parts of the brain) that the original signals, which
merely indicated the presence of certain wavelengths of light, are processed and give
rise to color perception.

And What of Color?

To find a way to describe light, we have looked at some physical properties of


electromagnetic radiation and the human eye, but we haven't said much about light's
most interesting aspect... color! The sensation of "seeing a color" that we experience
when looking at something green, or red, or indigo, arises from the detection of EMR
rays of various wavelengths. Yet, when light strikes our eye, it is generally composed of
EMR rays of a great variety of wavelengths -- though red, for instance, has a
wavelength of 650 nanometers, the light reflecting into our eyes off of a ripe, Red
Delicious apple contains radiation of many wavelengths, not just the 650 nm type that
is "ideal" red. To both describe this range of wavelengths that give rise to the
perception of a color, and to allows artists and scientists to quantitatively talk about
color, a system has been developed to formally describe color. Using this system, any
and every color can be described by three properties: hue, saturation, and brightness.

Hue, Saturation, and Brightness

The hue of a color is that psycho-physiological sensation that we get when we see
something as red, or blue, or any other color. That is, in careless, everyday parlance,
hue is what "color" something is, but, for our more scientific discussion here, hue is
simply one aspect of color. Specifically, a color's hue is determined by the wavelengths
of light rays reaching our eyes. But, as we've discussed, the eye detects lots of different
wavelengths of light, even when we are only looking at a single color. What we call hue,
then, is really just the dominant wavelength of a whole slew of light waves. For
instance, if we say an object is blue, it means that a majority of the light waves
bouncing off of the object have wavelengths at or near 475 nm (ideal blue)... but not
all.

Sometimes a color appears faded, or washed out. Take, for instance, a new pair of blue
jeans. At first, the color of the jeans will be saturated with blue, but as time wears on,
and the jeans are repeatedly washed, the deep blue color begins to fade from the
jeans. The blue jeans becomes less saturated, and take on a grayish tone. Getting back
to the scientific foundation we've established, a color's degree of saturation is related to
the proportion of light rays of the dominant wavelength (e.g. 475 nm waves for blue
objects) that strike the cone cells of the eye, versus all other rays present. This
property of being more vivid or more faded is termed saturation. The greater the
portion of light that arrive at our eyes with wavelengths of the dominant hue, the
deeper, more vivid, and thus more saturated, the color.

The third color property used in this system is brightness, and it is one of the odder
qualities of color. Qualitatively, brightness is the lightness or darkness of a color, and is
a measure of the light's intensity. Unlike hue and saturation, however, brightness
cannot be objectively measured to produce absolute values -- it can only be measured
relatively. In other words, a machine (or person) can tell if one color is lighter or darker
than another, but no absolute "brightness" value can be assigned. In this sense,
brightness is really only a psychological construct of the mind, not a physical property
of light waves.

In this figure, we see the three properties of


color in a 3D space.

An important thing to remember, however, is that psychologically, these three variables


are not independent; changing one will affect the sensation of the other two. For
example, decreasing the brightness of a sample, while holding everything else constant,
can alter a person's perception of the saturation. This is because the color "cone" that
these properties create is lopsided and stretched out (see figures above and below),
which in turn is due to the human visual apparatus not being equally sensitive in all
dimensions.
In this figure, we see a second representation
of the three properties of color in a 3D space,
but here the model has been skewed to show
the uneven sensitivity of the human eye to
changes in wavelength and frequecny.

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy