Color Theory Knowledge

Contents

• Overview
• Core Idea
• Key Concepts

Overview

Electromagnetic radiation, of varying frequency, amplitude, and spectrum, is emitted from sources and perceived by human eyes as color and brightness. A method of reproducing this color and radiation accurately on screens is required.

Read Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs for a fantastic overview.

Core Idea

• CIELAB color space controls for brightness and thus results in more perceptually distinct colors when brightness is helt constant
• RGB does not account for brightness and does not have a straightforward transformation for creating perceptually distinct colors
• all colors represented in RGB can be represented in CIELAB and vice versa—the benefit is that in CIELAB you have more useful slices of color space to shift parameters and generate new colors

Key Concepts

• human eyes have rods and cones, with cones (small, medium, and large) receiving a range of different spectra
• these signals are processed by the brain to form one’s vision and perception of color and brightness
• the range of spectra received by the cones falls roughly into red, green, and blue hues
• representing a color as the tuple of inputs to these cones is the basis of creating a color space