Tag Archives: chromaticity

White Point, CCT and Tint

As we have seen in the previous post, knowing the characteristics of light at the scene is critical to be able to determine the color transform that will allow captured raw data to be naturally displayed from an output color space like ubiquitous sRGB.

White Point

The light source Spectral Power Distribution (SPD) corresponds to a unique White Point, namely a set of coordinates in the XYZ color space, obtained by multiplying wavelength-by-wavelength its SPD (the blue curve below) by the Color Matching Functions of a Standard Observer (\hat{x},\hat{y},\hat{z})

Figure 1.  Spectral Power Distribution of Standard Daylight Illuminant D5300 with a Correlated Color Temperature of  5300 deg. K; and CIE (2012) 2-deg XYZ “physiologically relevant” Color Matching Functions from cvrl.org.

Adding (integrating) the three resulting curves up we get three values that represent the illuminant’s coordinates in the XYZ color space.  The White Point is then obtained by dividing these coordinates by the Y value to normalize it to 1.

The White Point is then seen to be independent of the intensity of the arriving light, as Y represents Luminance from the scene.   For instance a Standard Daylight Illuminant with a Correlated Color Temperature of 5300k has a White Point of[1]

XYZn = [0.9593 1.0000 0.8833] Continue reading White Point, CCT and Tint

Cone Fundamentals & the LMS Color Space

In the last article we showed how a digital camera’s captured raw data is related to Color Science.  In my next trick I will show that CIE 2012 2 deg XYZ Color Matching Functions \bar{x}, \bar{y}, \bar{z} displayed in Figure 1 are an exact linear transform of Stockman & Sharpe (2000) 2 deg Cone Fundamentals \bar{\rho}, \bar{\gamma}, \bar{\beta} displayed in Figure 2

(1)   \begin{equation*} \left[ \begin{array}{c} \bar{x}} \\ \bar{y} \\ \bar{z} \end{array} \right] = M_{lx} * \left[ \begin{array} {c}\bar{\rho} \\ \bar{\gamma} \\ \bar{\beta} \end{array} \right] \end{equation*}

with CMFs and CFs in 3xN format, M_{lx} a 3×3 matrix and * matrix multiplication.  Et voilà:[1]

Figure 1.  Solid lines: CIE (2012) 2° XYZ “physiologically-relevant” Colour Matching Functions and photopic Luminous Efficiency Function (V) from cvrl.org, the Colour & Vision Research Laboratory at UCL.  Dotted lines: The Cone Fundamentals in Figure 2 after linear transformation by 3×3 matrix Mlx below.  Source: cvrl.org.

Continue reading Cone Fundamentals & the LMS Color Space

A Just Noticeable Color Difference

While checking some out-of-gamut tones on an xy Chromaticity Diagram I started to wonder how far two tones needed to be in order for an observer to notice a difference.  Were the tones in the yellow and red clusters below discernible or would they be indistinguishable, all being perceived as the same ‘color’?

Figure 1. Samples off an image plotted on a typical xy Chromaticity diagram (black dots).

Continue reading A Just Noticeable Color Difference

Bayer CFA Effect on Sharpness

In this article we shall find that the effect of a Bayer CFA on the spatial frequencies and hence the ‘sharpness’ information captured by a sensor compared to those from the corresponding monochrome version can go from (almost) nothing to halving the potentially unaliased range – based on the chrominance content of the image and the direction in which the spatial frequencies are being stressed. Continue reading Bayer CFA Effect on Sharpness