Colours

and
Multimedia

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 Coloured Objects

• There are two possible reasons why an object may be

coloured:
– It may reflect light unevenly over the visible spectrum
– It may emit light unevenly over the visible spectrum.

• If an object reflects light evenly, it will be white or grey or

black

• If it emits light whose energy is spread evenly over the

spectrum, the light will be white.

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 Reflected light: Light incident on a surface

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 Why are things coloured?
• Most things reflect, rather than emit, light
• Materials have different absorption and scattering
characteristics for different wavelengths of light

Examples:
• A yellow object absorbs a lot of blue light, but scatters in the
longer (red and green) wavelengths

• Black clothing gets very hot in sunlight, because it doesn’t

scatter much light so it absorbs a lot (as heat)
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 Light and Spectra (range)

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 Light and Spectra (range)
• Visible light is an electromagnetic wave in the 400nm – 700 nm
range.
• Most light we see is not one wavelength, it’s a combination
of many wavelengths

The profile above is called a spectra ‫أطياف‬.

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 The Human Eye

• The eye is basically similar to a camera

• It has a lens to focus light onto the Retina of eye
• Retina full of neurons
• Each neuron is either a rod or a cone.

light

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 Photoreceptors
• The retina is the area at the back of the eye on
which the image we see is formed.
• Photoreceptors are sensitive to light, and send
signals to the brain about what we see.

• Two different types of receptors, commonly called

rods and cones
– Rods are for the night vision in black and white
– Cones are for daytime colour vision

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 Rods
• Rods are very sensitive to light, and allow us to see under a
very low level of illumination

• They give us our night vision, in shades of white, grey and

black

• About 120 millions rods in one eye

• Located mainly towards the edges of the retina (so better
for secondary vision)

• Cannot resolve fine detail

• Subject to light saturation
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 Cones
• Cones are less sensitive to light than the rods, so can
tolerate more light
• There are about 6 million cones, mainly concentrated on the
fovea area of the retina
• Three types of cone, each sensitive to a different
wavelength - this allows colour vision

• The actual wavelengths that the cones are most sensitive to

are 560nm, 530nm, 430nm, commonly labelled “red”,
“green”, “blue” respectively
– better labelling would be “short”, “medium”, and “long”
wavelengths

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 Artificial Eye

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 Blind See Through Sound

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 Additive Colour Matching

• This is the mixing of different coloured lights

– Red+green produces yellow
– Green+blue produces cyan
– Red+blue produces magenta

• The additive colour model RGB corresponds to that used by

human vision (approximately!)

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 RGB Colour Space

Original Colour Image

Red, Green, Blue (RGB) Respective Intensities

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 Colour Constancy/Stability Example

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 Colour Constancy/Stability Example

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 CRT Displays
• CRT displays have three phosphors (RGB) which produce a
combination of wavelengths when excited with electrons.

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 Monitors: flat screen
• There are two basic types of flat screen monitors:

• LCD: Liquid crystal display

– Liquid crystal light gates control transmission of light
through polarized light filters

• Plasma
– Cells of neon gas are ionised by a high voltage to
release ultraviolet photons turned into visible light by
a phosphorscreen

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 Flat-screen characteristics
• LCD:
– Lower power
– Can be quite small or larger: pixel pitch is 0.2 to
0.5mm
– Sizes up to about 32 inches (but larger
recently possible)

• Plasma:
– Relatively higher power consumption
– Difficult to make small
– Generally above 32 inches

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 Use of Video RAM

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 Monitor Gamut
• The gamut is the range of displayable colour
• Note that the gamut shrinks as surrounding light
increases
– as you will know from trying to use a monitor when
the sun is shining
• The darkest colours are lost first

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 Colour Models

Different ways of constructing colours

• some ways are from primaries
• some are more numerical ways
Some of the more common systems:
• RGB (red green blue)
• CMY (cyan magenta yellow)
• CMYK (cyan magenta yellow black)
• HSV (hue saturation value)
• CIE (Commission Internationale d’Eclairange)
primaries
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 RGB
• Typical colour scheme used in graphics programming,
image files, HTML etc.

• R, G, B values typically all from 0-255 (each stored in 1

byte)

Examples:
• Orange R=255 G=135 B=75
• Turquoise R=23 G=173 B=178

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 CMY and CMYK
• CMY = Cyan Magenta Yellow
Invert CMY you will get:

• Amount of Cyan in a colour is the same as how much

red is “missing” in the colour compared to white (with the
red fully on)
• Similarly,
– Amount of Magenta = amount of green missing
– Amount of Yellow = amount of blue missing
• Subtractive system
• CMYK has added black and is used for printing
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 RGB and CMY
• RGB and CMY are complementary (complete each other)
colour models

C = G+B = W-R
M = R+B = W-G
Y = R+G = W-B
(W = white)

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 C

Original Colour Image

Y

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 HLS/HBS/HSV
• Closer to how we think about colour
• Hue
– which colour along spectrum of red - yellow-green-
blue-violet
• Lightness or Brightness or Value
– how much or little light is produced from an area
• Saturation or Colourfulness
– how much colour it exhibits (greys are very unsaturated)

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 Device-Dependent Colour Models
• Colour models so far: RGB, HSV,CMY,CMYK
• They are all device-dependent
– specific to particular hardware
– eg a colour with RGB values (140,60,203) will show up
as slightly different colours on different monitors

• There is a need to achieve colour fidelity (trustworthiness)

– imagine an image being created, displayed on the
screen, then printed. It can be important to keep the
colours the same at each stage of the process.

• What we need: a device-independent colour model.

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 CIE and the Standard Observer
• Based on experiments, the CIE (Committee
Internationale de l’Éclairage) in 1931 defined a
– Standard Observer
– A standard set of three primaries (X,Y,Z)
• These primaries are “imaginary” primaries in that
they do not actually correspond to real visible colours
• They are “not real” in the sense that they are more
saturated (intensely colourful) than real colours
• Y is chosen to match a standard measure of
brightness - also known as Gamma (Υ)
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All visible colours are in a horseshoe shaped cone in the X-Y-
Z space

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221
 XYZ and Device Independence
• XYZ is one industry standard for a device
independent colour space

• Some printers and monitors are capable of using

this standard to produce colour output that is faithful
to the input colours

• What happens (in brief) is that the device is

calibrated, so that it knows how to convert to and from
XYZ and its own (device-dependent) colour model
(RGB or CMYK)
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 Gamut for different technologies/Devices

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 Accurate Colour Matching
• Monitor calibration alone doesn’t ensure colour
matching
• Colour matching technology requires software to
perform calculations matching colours between
screen and printer (or other devices)

• The calculations are between the colour models

used by the devices (e.g. the RGB of a monitor or the
CMYK of a printer) and an objective device
independent colour model, such as a CIE colour
model
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 Colour Matching Systems
Examples:
• PANTONE has about 1000 unique colours

• COLORCURVE identifies colours by a lightness value, a

red/green value, and a blue/yellow value

• TRUMATCH and FOCOLTONE use “colour index books”

that allow the user to select CMYK colours according to what
is printed on the printer

How to use:
• Install software on computer, print out samples, then
choose your colour according to the printout
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 What is colour blindness?
• Colour blindness is not a “blindness”. It is a common
misperception that colour blind people cannot see colours.

• Colour blind people can see colours, but they see a different
range of colours from non-colour-blind people

• The cone receptors in their eyes (usually the red and/or the
green cones) are different.

• The cones are either missing, weaker, or are “set to

different wavelengths”

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 Types of Colour Blindness

• Trichromats have all three colours of cones

– trichromasy is having normal cones and sensitivity
– anomalous trichromasy (includes protanomalia and
deuteranomalia) is having all three types of cones but the peak
sensitivity of some of the cones is shifted

• Dichromats have only two colours of cones, with sensitivity from

one type of cones extremely weak or missing
– dichromasy includes protanopia, deuteranopia,
tritanopia (the latter is very rare)

• Monochromats see only light/dark. This is extremely rare. (See

Sacks, O., The Island of the Colour-Blind)
• 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are some type of
colour-blind
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 Protanomalia
• The red cones are weak
• 1 out of 100 men are affected
• A protanomalic person sees all colours, but may adjust the
TV so that it appears much too reddish

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 Deuteranomalia
• The green cones are weak
• 5 out of 100 men are affected
• A deuteranomalic person sees all colours, but will adjust the
TV so that it appears much too greenish

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 Protanopia
• The red cones give a severely reduced red brightness
• 1 out of 100 men are affected
• Protanopic people may not even see red traffic lights

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 Deuteranopia
• The green cones give severely reduced green-ness, but overall less
dimming (not bright) than with protanopia
• 1 out of 100 men are affected
• Deuteranopic people confuse red, yellowish-brown, green!

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 Some colour-blindness tests

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 Effects on everyday life
• Lack of thought by designers is the major problem facing
those who are colour-blind
• As one colour-blind man puts it:
“We don’t buy things we can’t use.
We don’t hit web pages we can’t read”

• An example of bad design:

A mobile phone charger with a light which is red to indicate
charging, and green to indicate when fully charged.
One enterprising colour-blind man ended up putting a radio
next to the charger: buzz means charging, intermittent buzz
means fully charged!
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 Colour-blindness and Design
• Check for strong contrasts between colours, paying special attention
to red,yellow, green, orange, brown
• Don’t make your information depend purely on colour – Say “the
button on the left”, not “the red button”
• If you’re not colour-blind (or only mildly so), use colour-blindness
simulators to test your software interfaces yourself
– Simulators available include www.vischeck.com - an online
image/web page tester

• If you are colour blind, get a non-colour blind friend to give their
opinion of the tastefulness of the colour scheme
• Let users customise their colours
– but don’t pick poor ones in the first place!
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 End of lecture

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