How to express color

How would you describe the color of a rose? Would you say it's "yellow", sort of "lemony yellow", or maybe a "bright canary yellow" color?

Your perception and interpretation of color are highly subjective and , quite often, very different from someone else's. What's more, eye fatigue, age, and other physiological factors can influence your color perception.

To express the color of an object, such as the rose, one person's response will vary from another's. Each observer will interpret the color based on personal references. They'll also verbally define the object's color differenctly.

As a result, it's difficult to objectively communicate a particular color to someone without some type of standard or mutually agreed upon way of expressing it. Once this standard is determined, there must be a way to compare one color to the next with accuracy.

The solution is a measuring instrument that explicitly identifies a color. That is, it differentiates a color from all others and assigns it a numeric value.

Today, the most commonly used instruments for measuring color are specrophotometers, colorimeters, and densitometers.

While all three types of instruments measure reflected or transmitted light, a spectrophotometer measures light at many points on the visual spectrum which results in a curve. A colorimeter (tristimulus), on the other hand, measures light much like the human eye using red, green, and blue receptors.

A densitometer is similar to a colorimeter except that its responses are designed for measuring specific materials such as printing inks and photographic dyes.

Each color has its own distinct appearance, based on three elements: Hue. Value. Chroma. By describing a color using these three attributes, you can accurately identify a particular color and distinguish if from any other

When asked to identify the color of an object, you'll most likely speak first of its hue. Quite simply, HUE is how we perceive an object's color. "Red," "Orange," "Green," "Blue," etc.

The second characteristic of color describes its luminous intensity - that is, its degree of "lightness". Colors can be classisfied as light or dark colors when comparing the VALUE.

For example, when placing a tomato and radish side-by-side the red of the tomoto appears to be much lighter. In contrast, the radish has a darker red value.

The vividness or dullness of a color describes its CHROMA. Again comparing the tomato and radish, the red of the tomato is much more vivid; the radish appears duller.

In other words, CHROMA indicates how close the color is either to gray or the pure hue.