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| Understanding Color/Light and Color | Index | Home |
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What is color? |
Human color recognition depends upon light, objects that reflect light, and the viewer's eyes and brain. |
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Light entering the eye is converted to neural signals in the retina and sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The eye reacts to the three additive primary colors of red, green, and blue, and the brain perceives color as a combination of these three signals. The perception of color varies greatly according to the external environment. The same color appears different when seen by sunlight or candlelight. However, human vision adapts to the light source, allowing us to determine that it is the same color in both cases. |
As with taste, sound, smell, and the other senses, the perception of color also varies from one individual to another. We might perceive a color to be warm, cold, heavy, light, soft, strong, exciting, relaxing, brilliant, or subdued. However, perception in every single case depends on the person's culture, language, age, sex, living environment, and past experiences. Two people will never have exactly the same impression of a single physical color. People differ even with regards to their sensitivity over the range of visible light. |
The size of an object also makes a difference. Probably everyone has had an experience where he or she had selected garments or appliances based upon a small color sample of the items and found that the products' actual color differed from the sample. |
Light is presently defined to be the mediating means for perceiving objectsit illuminates. When our eyes are stimulated by the reflected light from an object, we perceive and recognize the light as a color. |
Compare:Understanding Color/Self-luminous color and object color |
Compare:Understanding Color/The three primary colors of light |
Compare:Understanding Color/Human color perception apparatus (optic nerve and brain) |
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