User:Joger/Color Management

This document contains personal draft notes on color management topics, and can not be considered a reference on the topic.

Definitions

Luminance, denoted Y, unit cd·m^-2 (nits) is a linear light quantity, where physical intensity is weighted by the sensitivity of human vision. Luminance is an integral over a spectral power distribution but because of the way the eye works, it can also be calculated as a weighted sum of linear-light red, green, and blue tristimulus components, and takes human brightness sensitivity to different wavelengths into account. For example, if we have three light sources, red, green, and blue, and they each emit the same power, the green light source will appear the brightest, while the blue light source will appear the darkest. This means that formulas that calculates luminance from R, G, and B values, will put more weight on green colors than the other primaries, as shown in the Rec. ITU-R BT.709 which standardizes some classes of displays:

⁷⁰⁹Y = 0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B

Here, luminance gets 21% of its power from red, 72% of its power from green, and 7% of its power from blue. Note that luminance is typically not used in video processing, because we rarely intend to reproduce the absolute luminance of the actual scene.

Relative luminance, is a unitless quantity, and is proportional to the scene luminance up to the maximum luminance of the screen/device. Relative luminance is calculated by normalizing the scene luminance to 1 or 100 units, relative to a reference white which is assumed to appear white to the observer in the ambient environment.

Luma, denoted Y' , is calculated as a weighted sum of gamma corrected R', G', and B' components.

Color primaries, or primaries, are the primary colors (typically red, green, blue for digital video and image processing). These are not absolutes, but are selected from the visible spectrum based on constraints of the capturing or display device. These primaries define a triangle of colors that can be represented. Other colors are expressed as a weighted sum of primaries. Primary colors are defined by their (x,y) coordinates in a CIE diagram.

White point is a set of tristimulus values that is used to define 'white' on a display device. The white point is engineered such that equal amounts of R, G, and B primaries will appear white for a reference observer in a reference environment.

Gamut is the set of all possible colors that can be captured or reproduced by a device. The gamut is a volume of colors spanning the three primary colors R, G, and B, and the white point. This means that a device can not capture or reproduce colors that for example are greener than its green primary, or whiter than its white point.

Transfer functions map numerical coordinates to and from a color space. The transfer functions can be linear, or non-linear. Typical examples of non-linear transfer functions are Gamma 2.2 and the non-linear transfer function defined by sRGB .