Color Science !

(what color is, and how we see it)
 

The Science of Color:
principles for the web (with additive light) and print (with subtractive pigments);

the basic concepts of primary colors & hue/saturation/brightness & web-safe colors

• Two excellent introductions — simple and clear, brief yet thorough — are Understanding Color and (to explain a wider variety of concepts, including hue, saturation, and brightness, plus grayscale and websafe colors, in 8 short pages) a Color Tutorial.

• A Color Glossary with lots of interesting concepts about physics, physiology, and art
• Visual Summaries of Basic Color Concepts (hue, saturation, brightness) including a "split out the white" way to understand saturation, by Craig Rusbult.
• Word-IQ offers a web-page (and website) with lots of resources to explore, especially for the physiology and psychology of human vision.
• The Color of Solutions with Transition Metal Complexes
• Tests for Color Blindness (occurs mainly in men, rarely in women) — How do we see color?
• Ultraviolet Vision — How does UV vision differ between humans and other animals?

• The obsolete 216 web-safe colors are shown, arranged in a table-grid and a click-able flower and big flower plus resources to explore: Home-Page, Color-FAQ,...   Lynda explains reasons for modern web-artists to ignore these color limitations (if they don't want to be stuck in a rut from 1997) or (to avoid dithering for the rare websurfers who are still using old 8-bit systems) pay attention to them.  But instead of just 216, how about 4096?  The 4096 web-smart colors are much less artistically limiting, yet are safe (to avoid dithering) on almost all monitors and computers now being used: More Crayons & 4096 Colors.  Or you can have millions of colors, because 256x256x256 = 16,777,216.  But do all computer screens show this many colors? (a "millions of colors" lawsuit against Apple)   (I.O.U. - Later I'll add more pages about color-on-the-web.)
 




 
This website for Whole-Person Education has TWO KINDS OF LINKS:
an ITALICIZED LINK keeps you inside a page, moving you to another part of it, and
 a NON-ITALICIZED LINK opens another page.  Both keep everything inside this window, 
so your browser's BACK-button will always take you back to where you were.
 
 
Here are some related pages:

homepage for
Science in the Arts

 
This page, written by Craig Rusbult, is
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/teach/color-science.htm

Copyright © 2002 by Craig Rusbult
all rights reserved

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