Color for Science, Art and Technology (Volume 1) (AZimuth, Volume 1) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0444898468 ISBN 13: 9780444898463

Publisher: North Holland, 1998

Synopsis

The aim of this book is to assemble a series of chapters, written by experts in their fields, covering the basics of color - and then some more. In this way, readers are supplied with almost anything they want to know about color outside their own area of expertise. Thus, the color measurement expert, as well as the general reader, can find here information on the perception, causes, and uses of color. For the artist there are details on the causes, measurement, perception, and reproduction of color. Within each chapter, authors were requested to indicate directions of future efforts, where applicable.

One might reasonably expect that all would have been learned about color in the more than three hundred years since Newton established the fundamentals of color science. This is not true because:

• the measurement of color still has unresolved complexities (Chapter 2)

• many of the fine details of color vision remain unknown (Chapter 3)

• every few decades a new movement in art discovers original ways to use new pigments, and dyes continue to be discovered (Chapter 5)

• the philosophical approach to color has not yet crystallized (Chapter 7)

• new pigments and dyes continue to be discovered (Chapters 10 and 11)

• the study of the biological and therapeutic effects of color is still in its infancy (Chapter 2).

Color continues to develop towards maturity and the editor believes that there is much common ground between the sciences and the arts and that color is a major connecting bridge.

About this title

About the Author

Editor Kurt Nassau is active as author, lecturer and consultant. He holds degrees from the Universities of Bristol and Pittsburgh. He recently retired as Distinguished Research Scientist after 30 years at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked in a wide range of areas covering the preparation, chemistry and physics of laser crystals, semiconductors, superconductors, non-linear optical crystals, and glasses, among others. He has also performed medical research at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC while in the US Army and taught graduate students as Visiting Professor at Princeton University. In addition to The Physics and Chemistry of Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color, he has also written Experimenting with Color for teenagers and two books on the history, science and the state of the art of gemstone synthesis and of gemstone enhancement, as well as the "Colour" article used in the Encyclopaedia Britannica since 1988.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Can you answer these questions? - the book can!

1. When yellow and blue paints are mixed, the result is green (this is subtractive color mixing). What color results from mixing yellow and blue paints in stage lighting? ANSWER Not green - the answer is white. Yellow and blue in stage lighting gives white because these are complementary colors. The subtractive primary colors are magenta (a purplish red), yellow, and cyan (a bluish green). The additive primary colors are red, green, and a violet blue (look closely at a color television screen). See chapter 1.

2. There are three sets of color detectors, the cones, in our eyes, but only two color signals sent from our eyes to our brain. What are they? ANSWER The two "opponent" signals are a blue-yellow balance and a green-red balance. See Chapters 1, 3, and 15.

3. Why do we see a blue color in clean water in the ocean or a swimming pool; and in a glacier or iceberg? ANSWER The vibrations of the H20 molecules in both water and ice absorb very weakly at the red end of the spectrum, giving a complementary pale blue color seen only in bulk. See Chapter 4.

4. What do these four blue colors have in common: the blue of a clear sky, the blue of a pale colored skin when cold, blue eyes, blue bird feathers? ANSWER All involve the so-called Raleigh scattering of light from tiny particles. See Chapters 4 and 8.

5. Why do color reproductions of abstract art often not show the effects displayed in the original as intended by the artist? ANSWER Surface texture and other subtle painting techniques produce emergent properties such as film-mode transparence effects. See Chapter 5.

6. What is the anthropologist's basic triad of color used by early man in body decoration? ANSWER Black, red, and white. See Chapter 6.

7. How can one perform fully-controlled, double-blind testing for the therapeutic effects of colors with neither patient nor physician knowing what colors are being used? ANSWER For example, use these three white illuminations: an incandescent white containing all colours and equally-appearing whites made up of complementary near-monochromatic mixtures of blue and yellow and of red and green. See Appendix to Chapter 9.

8. Since all light produces deterioration of the pigments and dyes, how can museums preserve art objects and still permit them to be viewed? And are inorganic (mineral) pigments inherently more stable than organic (vegetable, animal, or synthetic) pigments and dyes? ANSWER Use a low light level, minimize ultraviolet and air pollution, maintain low and constant temperature and humidity (but some slow deterioration is nevertheless inevitable). Both inorganic and organic pigments and dyes can deteriorate. See Chapter 12.

9. Since color printing, electronic color displays, photographic prints, transparencies, negatives etc. all have different gamuts (ranges of colors available), how can one realistically interconvert among these? ANSWER Use computer encoding and a series of transformations, often non-linear, involving luminance ranges, image compression, etc. See Chapters 14 and 15.

Edition details

• Publisher: North Holland
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0444898468
• ISBN 13: 9780444898463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 498
• Editor: Nassau Kurt