Chapter 19

Color

Erik Reinhard

Garrett Johnson

Photons are the carriers of optical information. They propagate through media taking on properties associated with waves. At surface boundaries they interact with matter, behaving more as particles. They can also be absorbed by the retina, where the information they carry is transcoded into electrical signals that are subsequently processed by the brain. It is only there that a sensation of color is generated.

As a consequence, the study of color in all its guises touches upon several different fields: physics for the propagation of light through space, chemistry for its interaction with matter, and neuroscience and psychology for aspects relating to perception and cognition of color (Reinhard et ...

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