Human Color Perception

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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