NVQ v in ICT Theory Lesson

Chapter 01 Introduction to Graphic

Module 1.3

Define Colour, Colour models, Colour palettes, Dithering

What is color
Color is the frequency of a light wave within the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum to
which the human eye responds.

• Infrared light is radiated heat. Ultraviolet light is beyond the higher end of the visible spectrum

• By adjusting the combinations of the 3 colors Red, Green and Blue, the eye and brain
interpolates the in between colors

Color is a property of light. Our eyes see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light
is made up of the wavelengths of light between infrared and ultraviolet radiation (between 400 and 700
nanometers). These frequencies, taken together, make up white (sun) light.

White light can be divided into it's component parts by passing it through a prism. The light is separated
by wavelength and a spectrum is formed. Sir Isaac Newton was the first to discover this phenomenon in
the seventeenth century and he named the colors of the spectrum.

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How we can see color ?

Although you see color in our brain, it is the eye that has the receptors that tell your brain what you are
looking at. There are two sets of receptors in the retina in the back of the eye: rods and cones.

There are about 125 million rods (named for their shape). They are very sensitive to light but are mostly
color blind. We use them in dim light and so the saying: "all cats are gray in the dark."

The color detectors in the eye are the cones. There are about 7 million of these in three forms
concentrated in the center of vision. Individual cones can only sense one of three narrowly defined
frequencies of light: red, green and blue. The response from these three "primary" colors is sorted in our
brain to give us the perception of color. One or more of these color receptors malfunctions in a color
blind person.

Color Models

Color models are used to classify colors and to qualify them according to such attributes as hue,
saturation, chroma, lightness, or brightness. They are further used for matching colors and are
valuable resources for anyone working with color in any medium: print, video, or Web.

In this Technical Guide, we will see the ways color is made accessible to designers and look at
some of the problems that occur when color is specified in one medium and produced in another
(for example, when color is specified on a computer and produced on a four-color printing
press).

RGB & CMY

The red, green, blue and cyan, magenta, yellow models are closely related, the primary colors of
each form the secondary colors of the other. These are also the most representative models for
additive and subtractive colors, respectively. RGB is also the basic color model for on-screen
display.

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HSB/HLS

Hue, saturation, and brightness and hue, lightness, and saturation are two variations of a similar
model that is a standard for computer graphics and that closely models the qualities most
apparent to human perception of color.

Munsell

The Munsell color system is one of the most influential systems developed for ordering colors
that can be used for production. While its practical application is mostly outside of print
production, it still forms the basis for most other work on color modeling.

CIE

The CIE color models are highly influential systems for measuring color and distinguishing
between colors. We will examine three CIE models: CIEXYZ, CIELUV, and CIELAB. The last
of these, CIELAB, is very important to color management.

The RGB (CMY) Color Model

RGB and its subset CMY form the most basic and well-known color model. This model bears
closest resemblance to how we perceive color. It also corresponds to the principles of additive
and subtractive colors.

Additive Colors

Additive colors are created by mixing spectral light in varying combinations. The most common
examples of this are television screens and computer monitors, which produce colored pixels by
firing red, green, and blue electron guns at phosphors on the television or monitor screen.

More precisely, additive color is produced by any combination of solid spectral colors that are
optically mixed by being placed closely together, or by being presented in very rapid succession.
Under these circumstances, two or more colors may be perceived as one color.

This can be illustrated by a technique used in the earliest experiments with additive colors: color
wheels. These are disks whose surface is divided into areas of solid color. When attached to a
motor and spun at high speed, the human eye cannot distinguish between the separate colors and
sees them instead as a composite of the colors on the disk

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Subtractive Colors

Subtractive colors are seen when pigments in an object absorb certain wavelengths of white light
while reflecting the rest. We see examples of this all around us. Any colored object, whether
natural or man-made, absorbs some wavelengths of light and reflects or transmits others; the
wavelengths left in the reflected/transmitted light make up the color we see.

This is the nature of color print production and cyan, magenta, and yellow, as used in four-color
process printing, are considered to be the subtractive primaries. The subtractive color model in
printing operates not only with CMY(K), but also with spot colors, that is, pre-mixed inks.

RGB

Red, green, and blue are the primary stimuli for human color perception and are the primary
additive colors. The relationship between the colors can be seen in this illustration

The secondary colors of RGB, cyan, magenta, and yellow, are formed by the mixture of two of
the primaries and the exclusion of the third. Red and green combine to make yellow, green and
blue make cyan, blue and red make magenta.

The combination of red, green, and blue in full intensity makes white. White light is created
when all colors of the EM spectrum converge in full intensity.

The importance of RGB as a color model is that it relates very closely to the way we perceive
color with the    receptors in our retinas. RGB is the basic color model used in television or
any other medium that projects the color. It is the basic color model on computers and is used for
Web graphics, but it cannot be used for print production.

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CMY(K)

Cyan, magenta, and yellow correspond roughly to the primary colors in art production: red, blue,
and yellow. In the illustration below, you can see the CMY counterpart to the RGB model shown
above:

Just as the primary colors of CMY are the secondary colors of RGB, the primary colors of RGB
are the secondary colors of CMY. But as the illustrations show, the colors created by the
subtractive model of CMY don't look exactly like the colors created in the additive model of
RGB. Particularly, CMY cannot reproduce the brightness of RGB colors. In addition, the CMY
gamut is much smaller than the RGB gamut

The CMY model used in printing lays down overlapping layers of varying percentages of
transparent cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. Light is transmitted through the inks and reflects off
the surface below them (called the substrate). The percentages of CMY ink (which are applied as
screens of halftone dots), subtract inverse percentages of RGB from the reflected light so that we
see a particular color:

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In the illustration above, a white substrate that reflects 100% of the light is printed with a 17%
screen of magenta, a 100% screen of cyan, and an 87% screen of yellow. Magenta subtracts
green wavelengths, cyan subtracts red wavelengths, and yellow subtracts blue wavelengths from
the light. The reflected light, then, is made up of 0% of the red wavelengths, 44% of the green
wavelengths, and 29% of the blue wavelengths. The resulting spectral reflectance/transmittance
curve would look approximately like this:

What is color Pigments

Pigments are substances that can be ground into fine powder and used for adding color to dyes and
paints.

Pigments were originally derives from animal, mineral, and vegetable sources.

Examples:

Purple from shell fish , Red dye from the dried , bodies of scale insects

Pigments behave almost the opposite of light. With pigments a black surface absorbs most of the light,
making it look black. A white surface reflects most of the (white) light making it look white. A colored
pigment, green for instance, absorbs most of the frequencies of light that are not green, reflecting only
the green light frequency. Because all colors other than the pigment colors are absorbed, this is also
called the subtractive color theory.

If most of the green light (and only the green light) is reflected the green will be bright. If only a little is
reflected along with some of the other colors the green will be dull. A light color results from lots of
white light and only a little color reflected. A dark color is the result of very little light and color
reflected.

The primary colors in the pigment theory have varied throughout the centuries but now cyan, magenta
and yellow are increasingly being used. These are the primary colors of ink, along with black, that are
used in the printing industry. This is a CMYK color system (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and (K)black). These
are the secondary colors of the light theory.

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Color Gamut

One problem that needs also to be addressed in discussing RGB and CMY is the issue of gamut
constraints. The representation of the whole range, or gamut, of human color perception is quite
large. However, when we look at the RGB and CMY color models—which are essentially
models of color production—we see that the gamut of colors we can reproduce is far less than
what we can actually see.

While not precise, the illustration below clearly shows this problem by superimposing
representative RGB and CMY gamuts over the 1931 CIE Chromaticity Diagram (representing
the whole gamut of human color perception):

Both models fall short of reproducing all the colors we can see. Furthermore, they differ to such
an extent that there are many RGB colors that cannot be produced using CMY(K), and similarly,
there are some CMY colors that cannot be produced using RGB.

The exact RGB or CMY gamut depends on other factors as well. Every RGB device, whether a
display monitor, color printer, color scanner, etc., has it's own unique gamut. Although the print
industry has set standards for color production (e.g., SWOP—Specifications for Web Offset
Publications), variances in presses, inks, and paper, as well as differences in environmental
conditions within any given print house, affect the gamut of CMY(K) output.

These differences in gamut can create problems in the color production of computer-generated
graphics and pages and inconsistent color is a problem inherent in all computer-generated color
output.

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Color Palate

Any computer users view the Web in 256 color-mode (also known as 8-bit), because either their
computers don’t have video cards that support more colors, or their computers are set to view
only 256 colors. Each operating system, for example, Mac OS, Windows, or Windows 95/98 has
its own fixed color palette that Web browsers use to reduce color information for 8-bit video
cards. When people with 8-bit video cards view your Website, their browser converts the images
to the palette used by their system by shifting the colors that you’ve created on your site to colors
it uses in its fixed palette. Often this can greatly distort the color scheme you intended for your
graphics.

There’s only one way to effectively avoid this problem – use a palette that is Browser Safe.
Fortunately, all system palettes have 216 colors in common. All color monitors can display them
and all browsers on all platforms will show each of these colors as is.

Color is displayed on your monitor with a combination of Red, Green and Blue values. The RGB
values for each color within this palette are all formed from variations of the RGB number values
00, 51, 102, 153, 204 and 255.

The hexadecimal code values for each color are all formed with variations of the hex code values
00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF.

These colors were chosen from a mathematical color cube based on multiplying six values of six
colors (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow). This is why the browser-safe palette is
sometimes called the 6x6x6 palette. It’s also frequently called Netscape palette, Explorer palette,
Color cube, Web color, and Web safe. Whenever you see these terms, it usually refers to the
colors browsers impose on end-users viewing the Web on an 8-bit system.

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If you design your Web graphics and color schemes with the Browser- safe color palette, your
site will not be prone to unexpected color shifting or dithering (which usually looks like
unwanted dots or speckles on artwork) on 8-bit systems.

Dithering

Full-color photographs may contain an almost infinite range of color values. Dithering is the most
common means of reducing the color range of images down to the 256 (or fewer) colors seen in 8-bit
GIF images. Dithering is the process of juxtaposing pixels of two colors to create the illusion that a third
color is present. A simple example is an image with only black and white in the color palette. Note that
dithering differs from gray scaling. In gray scaling, each individual dot can have a different shade of gray.

Blending colors to modify colors or produce new ones. Creating the illusion of new colors and shades by
varying the pattern of dots. Newspaper photographs, for example, are dithered. If you look closely, you
can see that different shades of gray are produced by varying the patterns of black and white dots.
There are no gray dots at all. The more dither patterns that a device or program supports, the more
shades of gray it can represent. In printing , dithering is usually called half toning, and shades of gray are
called halftones.

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