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Human Color Perception

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Science of Vision

Abstract

Common sense would suggest that the word color refers to the special quality that color photography, television, or printing adds to black-and-white, or colorless, versions of the same scene. However, in a technical sense the word “color” is also used to refer to variations in lightness, implying that color exists also in black-and-white reproductions. Wyszecki and Stiles’s (1982) Color Science (a massive, authoritative handbook concerned mainly with the physical basis of color vision) offers the following definition (p. 487):

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Boynton, R.M. (1990). Human Color Perception. In: Leibovic, K.N. (eds) Science of Vision. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3406-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3406-7_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7998-3

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