Colors vs. albedo

Hey everybody,

I have one question for you. Colors respond to a HSV classification (see this page for more details) or HSB. Precisely, the letter "V" (or "B") makes me interested. The question is "Does this letter indicates the albedo or not ?" If not, is there another correlation between colors and albedo ?

Bye

Sedna

It's a way of representing colours on a computer monitor, so not really. Incidentally there are various different types of albedo, with different definitions.

Note that the fact you can represent colours by 3 numbers is because of the way the eye detects colour (3 types of colour receptor). In reality there is a spectrum of wavelengths.

Well, this means it doesn't work in reality. Also, this means that the eye doesn't detects the colours on a computer monitor and in nature in the same way ? Looks wierd...

The point is you can fool the eye into seeing white light when the spectrum isn't remotely approximating "white". All you have to go on is the responses of the three different types of colour receptor in your eye. Balance those responses in the right way and it doesn't matter what the spectrum is like, you see white. Think about what you are seeing when you see "white" on a computer screen -- it is the sum of light output by red, green and blue pixels. This spectrum is very different from sunlight, yet both are seen as white.

This kind of thing is fortunate for art or matching up colours would be a nightmare.

If I understand in the right way, a color produced in the nature is the result of the "emission" of a part of the spectrum at a certain wavelengh, and the same color produced on a computer screen is the result of the mix of the primary colors, each one having a certain "concentration" in the mix.