Interactions between the albedo and the gloss on a surface are commonplace. Darker surfaces are perceived glossier (contrast gloss) than lighter surfaces and darker backgrounds can enhance perceived lightness of surfaces. We used maximum likelihood conjoint measurements to simultaneously quantify the strength of those effects. We quantified the extent to which albedo can influence perceived glo...

Surprisingly little scientific research has been conducted on the effects of colour and lightness on the perception of spaciousness. Practitioners and architects typically suggest that a room's ceiling appears higher when it is painted lighter than the walls, while darker ceilings appear lower. Employing a virtual reality setting, we studied the effects of the lightness of different room surfac...

A fundamental goal of research in the perception of surfaces is to understand the nature of the computations and representations underlying lightness perception. A significant challenge posed to the visual system is recovering surface lightness from the multiple physical causes that contribute to image luminance. One view asserts that the visual system decomposes the image into estimates of ill...

Synesthesia-like mappings between visual lightness and auditory pitch and between visual lightness and melodic interval were examined. When subjects rated how visual lightnesses and auditory pitches "fit together," lighter stimuli fit better with higher pitches, and darker stimuli fit better with lower pitches. These patterns were stronger against black than against white visual backgrounds; ho...

Color varies along dimensions of lightness, hue, and chroma. We used maximum likelihood conjoint measurement to investigate how lightness and chroma influence color judgments. Observers judged lightness and chroma of stimuli that varied in both dimensions in a paired-comparison task. We modeled how changes in one dimension influenced judgment of the other. An additive model best fit the data in...

of the reproduction’s. Therefore, if the lightness values of the maximum chroma in the two gamuts are not located at the center of the lightness axis of the two media, the parametric GMA will produce a different color change in the bright and dark regions. In this condition, if linear compression or soft-clipping compression is applied to the lightness mapping, the lightness value difference be...

The amount of light coming to the eye from an object depends on the amount of light striking the surface, and on the proportion of light that is reflected. If a visual system only made a single measurement of luminance, acting as a pho-tometer, then there would be no way to distinguish a white surface in dim light from a black surface in bright light. Yet humans can usually do so, and this skil...

Lightness induction is the classical visual phenomenon whereby the lightness of an object is shown to depend on its immediate surround. Despite the long history of its study, lightness induction has not yet been coherently and satisfactorily explained in all its variety. The two main theories that compete to explain it descend (i) from H von Helmholtz, who believed that lightness induction orig...