Chapter Three
Lightness, Brightness, Contrast, and Constancy
It would be dull to live in a gray world, but we would actually get along just fine 99% of the time. Technically, we can divide color space into one luminance (gray scale) dimension and two chromatic dimensions. It is the luminance dimension that is most basic to perception. Understanding it can help us answer practical questions: How do we map data to a gray scale? How much information can we display per unit area? How much data can we display per unit time? Can gray scales be misleading? (The answer is “yes.”)
To understand the applications of gray scales we need to address other, more fundamental questions: How bright is a patch of light? What is white? What is black? What is a middle ...
Get Information Visualization, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
