Billmeyer and Saltzman's Principles of Color Technology, 4th Edition

Chapter 1Physical Properties of Colors

A. WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT?

This is a book about color, colorants, the coloring of materials including measurement and control, and reproducing the color of materials through imaging.

Color can mean many things. In this book, color may mean a certain kind of light, its effect on the human eye, or — most important of all — the result of this effect in the mind of the viewer. We describe each of these aspects of color, and relate them to one another.

Colorants, on the other hand, are purely physical things. They are the dyes and pigments used in the process of coloring materials.

Coloring is a physical process: that of applying dyes to textiles or incorporating, by dispersion, pigments into paints, inks, and plastics. A part of this book is devoted to describing these physical substances and processes.

But color is much more than something physical. Color is what we see—and we repeat this many times—it is the result of the physical modification of light by colorants as detected by the human eye (called a response process) and interpreted in the brain (called a perceptual process, which introduces psychology). This is an enormously complicated train of events. To describe color and coloring, we must understand something of each aspect of it. A large portion of the book deals with this problem.

With an understanding of color in this broad sense, we can approach some commercial problems involving color. These problems are concerned with answering ...