Colour Science & Perception
what the eye settles, and what it cannot
Concept

Camera raw — where it appears

The sensor's own numbers before white balance, a colour matrix or a tone curve has touched them. They are a measurement in the camera's three channels rather than in anybody's colour space, which is why a raw file needs a profile to mean anything.

Named by 36 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A camera's spectral sensitivities, after the infrared-cut filter. Silicon quantum efficiency times the colour-filter dye times the infrared-cut filter, per channel, on a grid running to 1100 nm rather than to 780. With the filter removed, 68 per cent of the area under the three curves lies beyond the visible band, and all three curves are the same curve out there.

A camera is a fourth observer

The 1931 functions, the 1964 functions and a person's own cones are three sets of three curves that collapse a spectrum onto three numbers. A camera is a fourth, built from silicon and dye rather than from pigment and neural wiring, and it agrees with none of them.

imaging · Capture Everything between the photons and the picture, and what each stage decides. The 8 stages of a camera pipeline. Only the second is physics; every one after it is a decision somebody made, and the reason two cameras pointed at the same scene disagree is that they made different ones.

Raw is not a picture

A raw file is three integrals per site and a list of decisions nobody has taken yet. Every one of those decisions has a defensible answer and none of them has a correct one, which is why two converters open the same file and disagree.

imaging · Capture The blue channel, as the three things multiplied to make it. Silicon's quantum efficiency, the colour-filter dye's transmittance, and their product. The dye is the only stage carrying any colour information and it is clear above about 800 nm — transmittance 0.92 at 900 nm against 0.06 at 550.

Silicon sees past the visible

A sensor's response ends at 1107 nanometres because that is the band gap, and the colour-filter dyes have stopped absorbing three hundred nanometres before it. So all three channels measure the same thing over the last third of the range, and every published sensitivity plot is drawn after the component that hides it.

imaging · Capture How much of what an unfiltered sensor records is invisible. The share of a camera's raw signal coming from beyond 780 nm, against the colour temperature of the lamp, for one surface with a near-infrared reflectance of 0.62. Without the filter it runs from 98 per cent at 2000 K to 51 at 9000; with it, under five per cent everywhere.

The filter that makes colour possible

An infrared-cut filter is not a refinement on a colour camera. Removing it collapses the separation between the three channels by a factor of nearly nine under tungsten, and the component that keeps colour photography working is the one nobody photographs.

imaging · Capture One reflectance, four different infrared tails, and what the camera makes of each. The same visible reflectance continued past 780 nm to four different near-infrared values. A spectrophotometer reports only the left-hand part; an unfiltered sensor integrates all of it. The channel spread falls from 0.14 at a tail of 0.05 to 0.02 at 0.85, with nothing about the visible half changed.

Most things are pale in the infrared

A spectrophotometer stops at 780 nanometres and a black cotton shirt reflecting five per cent of visible light reflects more than half the near infrared. The measurement everybody has and the quantity a camera integrates are different quantities, and nothing in the first says so.

imaging · Capture A silicon sensor's best possible impersonation of the standard observer. The 1931 matching functions in outline, and the closest linear combination of the sensor's three sensitivities laid over them; underneath, what is left over at each wavelength. The residual is 31.7 per cent of the matching functions' own magnitude, worst at 440 nm. Colour reproduction is exact if and only if this is zero.

Luther said when it would work

There is an exact condition under which a fixed three-by-three matrix converts camera raw to XYZ correctly for every spectrum in existence. It was stated in 1927, it is a theorem rather than a guideline, and no camera ever built satisfies it.

imaging · Capture Two reflectances the camera records as identical. Constructed by projecting onto the null space of the sensor's own sensitivities, so the two raw triples agree to 0.0000 per cent. To the eye they are ΔE00 15.33 apart, which the swatches show.

The camera has its own metamers

Two surfaces a camera records as identical can be plainly different to a person, and two a person cannot tell apart can be recorded as different. Both pairs are constructed rather than found, from one projection, used for both.

imaging · Capture A camera profile is a fit, and the sample set is a hidden argument to it. Per-surface ΔE00 after the best 3 × 3 from raw to XYZ, fitted on 12 surfaces at chroma 0.2 and tested twice: on those same surfaces (mean 0.65) and on 12 at chroma 0.9 (mean 1.75). Both bars come from the same matrix; only the surfaces differ.

A camera profile is a fit

Since no matrix is exact, the one a manufacturer ships is a least-squares compromise over a set of surfaces somebody chose. Fitted on desaturated patches it is excellent on desaturated patches — and the sample set is a hidden argument to every camera profile in existence.

imaging · Capture The best a camera profile can do on the surfaces it was fitted to. Per-surface ΔE00 after the best 3 × 3 from raw to XYZ, fitted on 12 surfaces at chroma 0.7 and tested on those same 12 surfaces — mean 1.45, worst 2.58. This is the most favourable measurement it is possible to make of a camera and it is the one usually published.

No matrix is right everywhere

The best three-by-three this sensor admits, fitted and tested on the same twenty-four surfaces, leaves a worst case of ΔE00 2.85. A control sensor built to satisfy Luther's condition reaches ten to the minus seven under the identical computation, which is what makes the first number a measurement.

imaging · Capture A grey edge, reconstructed from a Bayer row, arrives coloured. Above: an achromatic step through 24 sensor sites, with green sampled on the even ones and red on the odd. Interpolating each channel separately reconstructs them from data taken on either side of the edge, so their ratio moves. Below: the resulting chroma, peaking at 144 per cent of the local mean, and 112 per cent once colour differences are interpolated instead.

A grey edge arrives coloured

A sensor site measures one channel and the other two are interpolated from neighbours that sat somewhere else. Across a black-and-white step that reconstruction gives an achromatic scene a chroma of 144 per cent of its own local mean, and nothing in the scene or the sensor was coloured.

imaging · Capture Recovering the lamp from a highlight rather than from an assumption. A green scene under illuminant A. The faint curve is the true lamp; the solid one is what the interface component of the glossy surfaces recovers, which is 0.30° from it. Grey-world on the same scene is 42.1° and max-RGB 17.5°, because both are assumptions about the surfaces and a Fresnel reflection is not.

The highlight is the white balance

Every estimator a camera uses is an assumption about the scene wearing the costume of a measurement. The specular component of a glossy surface is not — it carries the illuminant to within a third of a degree on a scene where averaging is fifty times worse, and it does so without knowing what colour the paint underneath is.

imaging · Capture Correcting colour costs noise, and the two cannot both be least. Sweeping the colour matrix from its own diagonal — a white balance with no cross terms — to the full least-squares fit. Mean ΔE00 falls from 18.61 to 1.29; photon noise rises by a factor of 1.03. At 10000 photons per pixel.

Correcting colour costs noise

The matrix that turns a sensor's raw into XYZ has large off-diagonal terms of both signs, because that is what correcting a sensor which fails Luther's condition requires. Differences of large numbers are where noise grows, and the full correction amplifies photon noise by 1.66 times.

imaging · Capture A clipped channel turns the hue of what is left. CIELAB hue shift against exposure for one saturated stimulus, measured against the same stimulus rendered without clipping. Nothing moves until the first channel reaches the ceiling at 0.25 stops; after that the recorded hue rotates by as much as 67 degrees, with nothing in the scene having changed colour.

A blown highlight turns

An exposure that clips nothing changes no hue at all. Once one channel reaches the ceiling the recorded hue rotates by as much as sixty-seven degrees, with nothing in the scene having changed colour — and every response a converter can make to that is an invention.

imaging · Capture Everything between the photons and the picture, and what each stage decides. The 8 stages of a camera pipeline. Only the second is physics; every one after it is a decision somebody made, and the reason two cameras pointed at the same scene disagree is that they made different ones.

A photograph is not a measurement

A photograph is a measurement made by an instrument whose kernel nobody published, under an illuminant nobody recorded, corrected by a matrix fitted to somebody else's surfaces, with two thirds of every pixel invented. It supports relative claims well and absolute ones badly, and it is used for the second.

imaging · Capture How wrong a camera profile is, and who it is wrong for. A colour matrix fitted against the 1931 observer, evaluated four ways. Its residual against that observer is ΔE00 0.92 — the Luther failure, which is a property of the sensor and is the honest measurement of the camera. Against a person drawn from a population of 160, the worst-off twentieth report 3.35. And a camera with no spectral error whatever, reporting the standard observer's own tristimulus values exactly, would leave 3.47. The camera is not the problem. It was fitted to somebody who does not exist, and so is the standard it was fitted against.

Fitted to an eye nobody has

A camera profile's residual against the observer it was fitted to is under a unit, and that is the number everybody quotes. Against a person drawn from a population it is 3.35 at the ninety-fifth percentile — and a camera with no spectral error whatever, reporting the standard observer's tristimulus values exactly, would carry 3.47. The camera is not the problem.

imaging · Capture The same flicker, written across the frame. A rolling shutter exposes each row of the sensor at a different moment, so a lamp that flickers above fusion is recorded as bands. There are 1.7 of them here — the readout time times the lamp's frequency, which is a camera setting and not a property of the light — spanning 2.37 stops. Held at matched luminance the lightest band and the darkest are still ΔE00 5.40 apart in colour, because the two drive currents are two spectra and the shutter caught one of each.

The shutter samples the lamp

A lamp switched between two drive currents at a hundred hertz is one steady colour to a person and two spectra to a camera. A thousandth-of-a-second exposure catches whichever phase the shutter opened at — two and a third stops of exposure and five units of colour, decided by nothing but timing — and a rolling shutter writes the difference across the frame as bands.

imaging · Capture The basis a camera balances in is a different basis for every light. A camera's white balance is a per-channel gain on raw values, which is a von Kries adaptation in whatever basis the filter dyes give it. That basis is not a property of the dyes alone: it is the dyes and the light in the room, and it moves when the light does. Each bar is how far the basis has turned, in degrees, from where it sits under D65. A sensor satisfying the Luther condition would have a bar of exactly zero on every row, because for such a sensor the light cancels — which is the one property nobody buys a sensor for.

A camera balances in another basis

White balance is a per-channel gain on raw values, which makes it a von Kries adaptation in whatever axes the filter dyes happen to give. Those axes are not a property of the dyes alone — they move with the light, by up to seventeen degrees across the adaptation census — and the sensor for which they would not move is the one that adapts worst of all.

imaging · Capture Four devices, and what each of them can do about a change of light. The mean over the census of what each device is left with. A press has no mechanism, so its number is the whole change — a printed sheet does not adapt to the room it is read in. A display can move its white point, which is a gain in its own primaries. A camera applies a gain in whatever basis its filter dyes happen to give it. And the sensor that satisfies the Luther condition exactly is worse than the silicon one — satisfying the condition means its channels are the matching functions, and a per-channel gain on the matching functions is the transform this site calls the oldest mistake still shipping.

Only one of these devices adapts

An eye, a camera, a display and a press all meet the same changes of light, and each has at most one thing it can do about them. The press has nothing at all, so its column is the whole change; and this collection's sensor built to satisfy the Luther condition exactly is the one that adapts worst.

limits · Limits Two lamps of the same colour, and one sheet that is two colours under them. The same brightened sheet under a xenon flash, the same flash behind its cover glass, and a phosphor-converted white LED of nearly the same chromaticity. Each patch is computed relative to its own lamp's white, which is what a perfect white balance does — so everything a camera can see and correct has already been removed. What is left is ΔE00 11.8 between the first and the last, against 3.2 between the two lamps themselves. The LED has no emission below 380 nanometres at all, because its pump die is at 450, so the sheet simply does not fluoresce under it and nothing in the photograph records why.

A camera cannot record the excitation

Two lamps of nearly the same chromaticity, one with ultraviolet and one with none, put a brightened sheet twelve units apart after a perfect white balance. Nothing in the camera measured the difference — the filter stack removed the band before the sensor saw it — so the correction that would fix the picture needs a quantity the file does not contain.

imaging · Capture What a camera matrix reports on its own chart, and what it delivers off it. The same camera fitted on charts of increasing chromatic range. The left bar of each pair is the mean error on the chart the matrix was fitted to, which is the number a profile comes with; the right bar is the error on a saturated set it never saw. At the thinnest chart the fit reports 0.19 ΔE00 and delivers 1.65, a factor of 8.6. The gap closes as the chart widens, and it closes because the chart improves rather than because the camera does.

The chart decides the profile

A camera's colour matrix is nine numbers fitted to a set of patches somebody chose, and the number that comes with it is the error on those patches. On a chart with no chromatic range that number is 0.19 ΔE00 and the matrix delivers 1.65 — and a second matrix, indistinguishable on the chart, delivers 2.03.

imaging · Capture A camera matrix fitted under each light, used under each light. Mean ΔE00 over the same surfaces, with the matrix fitted under the row's light and the scene under the column's. The diagonal is what a profile's data sheet quotes and is between 1.0 and 1.2 everywhere. Off it the numbers rise steeply: the matrix fitted under illuminant A reports 1.17 there and delivers 9.34 under a 9000 K daylight, a factor of 8.0. Nothing about the camera changes between cells.

A matrix is fitted under one light

A camera's colour matrix is nine numbers determined by a chart photographed under a particular illuminant, and the error it quotes is the error under that illuminant. Fitted under a tungsten lamp and used under a cold sky it delivers eight times as much — and the two-matrix scheme every real profile uses turns out not to be a compromise at all.

imaging · Capture The dyes a camera has, and the dyes an adaptation basis would want. Three sensor sensitivities drawn twice: faintly, the silicon-and-filter-array set this collection models, and boldly, three Gaussian dyes chosen to make the inverse of their own response matrix a good basis for a white-balance gain. The designed dyes sit at 610, 542, 449 nm with widths of 35, 26, 30 nm — narrower and further apart than the real ones, which is what sharpening looks like when a search rather than a committee does it. They leave 0.97 ΔE00 against the real sensor's 1.62, and they are held within 0.28 of the Luther condition so that the result is still a camera.

A sensor designed for its inverse

A camera's white balance is a gain in a basis made from its own dyes and the light in the room. Choose the dyes for that basis instead of for cost and quantum efficiency, hold the sensor within a stated distance of the Luther condition, and the design reaches the best adaptation figure any basis achieves — and then the room moves it.

imaging · Capture Four cameras that all satisfy the Luther condition exactly. Four sensors whose sensitivities are linear combinations of the colour-matching functions — the theoretical ideal, satisfying the condition to machine precision, each with an adaptation basis that does not move when the light does. They differ only in which linear combination, which the condition does not constrain, and they leave 2.46, 0.97, 1.65, 2.37 ΔE00 after a white balance. The best of them reaches 0.974, which is the best any basis at all achieves. Being a perfect colorimeter costs nothing in adaptation; what costs is the mixing matrix, and the control measured here carries one nobody chose.

The condition chooses no axes

It has long been said here that a sensor satisfying the Luther condition exactly adapts worse than a silicon one, and offered a reason — that its channels are the matching functions, and a gain on those is the oldest mistake in the subject. The measurement was of one sensor. The condition leaves the axes entirely free.

imaging · Capture Each departure over forty-two surfaces rather than one. The same six departures measured over a family of forty-two analytic reflectances — an absorption band of stated centre, width and depth — with the smallest, the median, the ninety-fifth percentile and the largest marked. Every one of them spans more than a factor of three, and the ranking between them is not stable across the family: what decides a departure's size is which sample it is asked about, because a departure is a pairing and the sample is one of the two factors. Quoting any single number for what an observer's age is worth is quoting a choice of example.

The chart was measured by an observer too

A camera profile is fitted so that the camera's numbers reproduce the chart's measured tristimulus values. Those values were computed through the 1931 observer, so the fit inherits every departure in this round — and the fit's own residual, at 0.19 ΔE₀₀ on the chart, is fifteen times smaller than the term it cannot see.

imaging · Capture The arguments a standard observer does not have. Seven choices inside a set of colour-matching functions, each with the shape it takes and what it is worth in ΔE₀₀ on a red pigment under a 6500 K radiator. Six are measurements: a field size, an age, a macular density, a cone optical density, three peak wavelengths and a rod contribution. The seventh is not — a change of basis is a change of curves and not a change of observer, and its entry is exactly zero because the space an experiment measures is what an observer is. Printing that zero beside the others is the clearest statement of what the other six are measurements of.

A sensor has no lens

A camera is a fourth observer and it is the only one with none of the six arguments this round measured. It does not age, it has no macular pigment, its response does not broaden with density and its peaks do not vary — so it is perfectly reproducible and is not any of the observers it is fitted to reproduce.

imaging · Capture One infrared-cut filter, crossed at four angles. The transmittance of the same interference filter for light crossing it at the centre of a frame and at three steeper angles, from 560 to 760 nm. Its half-transmission edge is at 665 nm straight on and moves to 658, 646 and 630 nm, following the edge wavelength times the square root of one minus the squared sine of the angle over the square of the stack's effective index, 1.8. The deepest reds are what it takes away, and a lamp decides how much light there was in them.

The corner of the frame has another filter

A camera's infrared-cut filter is an interference stack, and light crossing it at an angle sees its edge moved towards the blue — from 665 nm at the centre of a frame to 646 at twenty-five degrees. The corner's red channel loses a tenth of its response under daylight and a sixth under tungsten. A grey-card gain map makes the corner exactly right under the lamp it was made under; under a tungsten lamp the same grey is 2.6 colour differences wrong, under a white LED 4.2, and even under its own lamp the coloured patches are not corrected, because a moved edge is not a gain.

imaging · Capture A black level slightly wrong, through the balance, under daylight. A grey ramp from half a per cent to seventy-two per cent reflectance, with a pedestal error of a tenth, three tenths and one per cent of white left in all three raw channels before the white balance, against the same ramp with none. The horizontal axis is the grey's reflectance, logarithmic. At a three-tenths error a two per cent grey is 2.4 colour differences off, most of it chroma, and a seventy-two per cent grey 0.21. An equal offset in the raw channels is not equal after three different gains.

A black level is multiplied by the balance

Every raw value carries a pedestal that is subtracted before anything else, and a white balance is then a different gain in each channel. Subtracting a constant and multiplying by one commute only when the constant is zero or the gains are equal. So a pedestal left three thousandths of white too high becomes 2.4 colour differences in a two per cent grey, most of it chroma, in the colour the lamp starves — and pushing that shadow four stops in editing makes it 8.9. An offset in proportion to the lamp's own white is the exception, and it is exactly grey.

imaging · Capture Noise clipped at zero, averaged over a shadow, under tungsten. A grey ramp from black to ten per cent reflectance under tungsten, captured at three illustrative noise levels, with every negative raw reading set to zero before the readings are averaged over an area. Each line is the colour difference between that average and the noiseless grey. At high gain a half per cent grey is 1.04 off and a black frame 0.79; at very high gain the worst is 2.95, at 1.0 per cent. The same readings averaged before any clip come back exactly, at every level. The tint is gone once every channel sits several deviations above zero.

Clipped noise does not average away

Noise on a raw reading is as likely to fall below the true value as above it, which is why averaging an area removes it. A converter that sets negative readings to zero keeps the upper half and throws the lower away, and the mean of what is left is the signal plus a pedestal. With no black level error anywhere, a half per cent grey under a tungsten lamp comes out 1.04 colour differences off at high gain, 8.98 after a four-stop push — and a blur that removes every trace of the noise leaves the tint where it was.

imaging · Capture Three corrections for the corner of a frame, each made under daylight. The mean colour difference over twenty-four coloured patches between the centre of a frame and its corner, against the angle light arrives at, after three corrections each fitted under daylight, D65 and used under it: a grey-card gain map, a correction confined to the red channel's row, and a full three-by-three matrix. All three leave the grey exact. At 25° the gain map leaves 1.86, the red row 0.93 and the matrix 0.90; at 35°, 3.81, 1.95 and 1.81. Six more numbers buy almost nothing, because the moved edge is in one channel.

A corner is corrected by one row

A grey-card gain map makes the corner of a frame exactly right on grey and leaves coloured patches 1.86 colour differences wrong at twenty-five degrees. A three-by-three matrix fitted at that position halves it — and six of its nine numbers do nothing, because the moved filter edge is in one channel. The three that matter rebuild the lost red from green and blue, they carry to another lamp better than a gain map in eleven cases of twelve, and in the twelfth, a row fitted under tungsten and used in daylight, they leave the grey 9.2 off.

imaging · Capture Two matrices blended by colour temperature, under fourteen lamps. For each lamp, with the neutral held exact as a converter holds it: the mean colour difference over twelve test surfaces with a matrix fitted under that lamp (the short bar) and with the tungsten and daylight matrices blended at the weight its correlated colour temperature gives (the long bar). Smooth lamps on or near the locus sit within 6 per cent of their own matrix. The lamps with lines or narrow bands in them sit a median of 2.2 times theirs, from 1.38 for a broadband tube to 5.2 for a three-emitter source.

Two matrices do not reach a white LED

A camera profile's two matrices, blended by the scene's colour temperature, are as good as a matrix fitted anywhere along daylight. Under a white LED or a fluorescent tube the same blend leaves colours twice as far off as a matrix fitted under that lamp, and no weight inside the profile's range repairs it. What decides it is not how far the lamp sits from the Planckian locus — a triphosphor tube sits nearly on it and fares worst — but whether its spectrum has lines in it, which a white balance reading cannot see.

imaging · Capture Four ways to fill in a clipped highlight: a glossy surface with a reflection of the lamp, under tungsten. Twenty-four chart surfaces under tungsten, as a glossy surface with a reflection of the lamp, taken up a ramp until their raw channels reach the sensor's ceiling. Each line is the mean colour difference, at equal lightness, between the true colour and what one response to the clipped reading makes of it: clipping to white, carrying the clipped values through, filling the clipped channel from the surface's own ratio, and filling it from the surface's colour plus the lamp's. At 0.4, where most surfaces have one channel clipped, the four leave 5.87, 4.37, 5.56, 0.00; at 2, 2.90, 26.97, 8.18, 8.18.

Filling in a highlight is a claim about the surface

A converter that rebuilds a clipped channel has to say what the highlight was. A matt surface over-exposed keeps its own colour, and filling the lost channel from that colour is exact. A glossy highlight is the surface's colour plus a reflection of the lamp, and the same fill leaves it 7.6 colour differences too colourful — while a fill that solves for surface and lamp is exact. Neither works once two channels are clipped, and a tungsten lamp keeps a highlight in the one-channel band more than twice as long as daylight does.

imaging · Capture The confusion matrix, and which corner the common lamps are in. Twelve fixtures sorted two ways. Down the page is what their spectra are; across is what flicker says. The two corners on the diagonal are 7 fixtures the classifier gets right. The 3 missed are structured lamps that do not flicker — a white LED and a warm LED on constant drivers, and a three-emitter fixture — and those are the lamps most modern interiors are lit by. The 2 false alarms are smooth lamps that do flicker: a halogen lamp on mains and a tinted radiator, both of which a photograph of a room is quite likely to contain.

Flicker sorts lamps the wrong way

A camera cannot see a spectral line in its own white, so the essay on the two-matrix profile named the classifiers a device might have instead, and the first of them was flicker. Flicker is measurable, and it measures the wrong thing. It sorts lamps by how their power is delivered while the matrix needs them sorted by how their spectrum is shaped, and the two are independent: a white LED on a constant driver is perfectly steady and strongly structured, and it is what most indoor photographs are lit by.

imaging · Capture The statistic a converter would read, under each model. The log ratio of the two channels that are still open, against how bright the surface is, under the two models of what a highlight is. A matt surface over-exposed keeps its own ratio exactly — the line is flat, and it must be, because scaling every channel by the same amount leaves a ratio alone. A glossy surface carries a reflection of the lamp on top of its body colour, so its ratio slides towards the lamp's as the reflection strengthens: -0.086 of a log unit between a quarter of full scale and nine tenths. That slide is the whole of the evidence a converter has for choosing between them.

The converter can choose except where it matters

A converter rebuilding a clipped highlight has to say whether the surface was matt and over-exposed or glossy and carrying a reflection, and the evidence is whether its raw chromaticity slides towards the lamp's on the way up. Read through the sensor's own noise, the slide is clear on most of the chart from the few tens of pixels a specular highlight holds — and on the surfaces where it takes half a frame, confusing the two models costs more than the median. A ratio cannot see a common scale, and an exposure supplies one.

imaging · Capture The four places a clamp could sit are two pipelines. Every pair of clamp positions, with the largest difference their delivered values reach over a grid of raw inputs that includes negative ones. Two of the six are exactly zero: a clamp at zero commutes with the white balance, which is a positive scale applied channel by channel, and with the tone curve, which is monotone and fixes zero. It does not commute with the colour matrix, which is the only step that mixes the channels — so the four positions collapse to two, before the matrix and after it, and no measurement of any scene can say more than which side a converter is on.

Four places to clamp are two pipelines

The essay on clipped noise ended on a procedure: a black frame and a dim grey card at a high amplification would place each raw converter's clamp. A procedure is a claim that a measurement identifies something, and this one identifies less than it looks. A clamp at zero commutes with the white balance and with the tone curve and not with the colour matrix, so the four positions are two pipelines — and the measurement separates them, on a card at half a per cent of white rather than on the black frame.

imaging · Capture The same chart in two studios and in the room that holds both lamps. Each of the chart's twenty-four surfaces, with the pixels its slide needs at two standard deviations at high gain, on a logarithmic scale. Lit by a 3000 K radiator alone the worst surface needs 16,194; lit by daylight at 6500 K alone, 139,574. Lit by both, 50 and 50 per cent of the light, with a highlight of each lamp read together, the worst needs 10 and the median 6. The studios' hard surfaces sit at different places on the chart, and no surface is hard in both.

Two lamps decide what one lamp could not

Under one lamp a handful of surfaces cannot tell a glossy highlight from a matt over-exposure without most of a frame, because there the two differ by a scale a ratio cannot see. In a room lit evenly by a 3000 K lamp and daylight, every surface on the chart is decided from ten pixels. A body can sit at one lamp's white, not at two, and the rescue holds only while the second lamp carries a fifth of the light and its white sits far enough from the first.

imaging · Capture Four ways to correct the corner, under each of four lamps, at 25°. The mean colour error left on the chart's coloured patches at the corner of the frame, under each lamp, after: the red row fitted under that lamp; one red row fitted on the chart under all four lamps with the grey held under daylight; a grey-card gain map calibrated under daylight; and the worst of the other lamps' rows used by mistake. daylight: 0.93, 1.33, 1.86, 4.91; tungsten: 0.99, 1.45, 1.87, 3.26; white LED: 0.36, 1.39, 3.28, 1.77; fluorescent: 0.37, 1.56, 3.09, 2.45. The pooled row holds every lamp between 1.33 and 1.56.

One row for every lamp costs the lamps that lose least

A corner correction fitted under one lamp is right under that lamp and can be badly wrong under another, so a converter unsure of its lamp was offered a single row fitted under several at once. Pooled over four lamps, one row holds every lamp's corner between 1.33 and 1.56 colour differences — no lamp worse than a grey-card map, and none near the 4.91 a wrong row can leave. The price falls on the white LED and the fluorescent tube, which it leaves four times worse than their own rows, because they lose the least red at the corner and the pooled row is built to repair the lamps that lose the most. Two rows, one per class of lamp, keep almost all of both.

imaging · Capture

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Spectral sensitivityWhite balanceColour matrixLuther conditionIlluminantCalibrationLeast-squaresColour filter arrayIdentifiabilitySiliconClippingInfrared

All concepts