Equivalent lightness of elderlies investigated by cataract experiencing goggles

People get cataract in their eyes when they age. The color perceived by the senile cataract eyes desaturates because of the environment light that scatters in the eyes by the hazy crystalline lenses. We investigated the effect of the desaturation on brightness of objects in terms of the equivalent lightness , which is composed of the achromatic lightness and the chromatic lightness . If the color desaturates, becomes smaller and consequently becomes smaller in the cataract eyes. with and without cataract experiencing goggles at room illuminances to cover mesopic to photopic level was measured. Red, yellow, green, and blue patches of size 2° × 2° arc of the visual angle were investigated with the direct heterochromatic brightness matching between the color patches and a gray scale. Both took about the same value. with goggles was then transferred to the final where the matching gray scale was observed without goggles to express the equivalent lightness of cataract eyes by the gray scale perceived by normal eyes. with goggles was lower than without goggles by about 10 L* units in all the four colors. This reduction was almost equal to the reduction of L* by the reduced transmittance of the goggles showing that there was no effect of color desaturation. The color appearance in the color patches was measured by the elementary color naming method, and the results clearly showed the color desaturation with goggles implying decrease of . We concluded that the scattered environment light compensated the decrease of to keep the brightness of stimuli unchanged. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 38, 267–276, 2013     

Identification of traditional Thai colours used for mural paintings and Khon masks

Thai colour names used for mural paintings and Khon masks are not well known, uncommonly used, and some are forgotten. They are normally known today only among few artists who inherited the knowledge to paint them from their elders. However, the artists cannot quantitatively describe the characteristics of these colours, and this is a major impediment in colour identification and preservation studies that are necessary for future restoration works of temples and artifacts. The purpose of this article is to describe our research for identifying and quantitatively describing traditional Thai colours, as part of our effort to create a “Thai Colour Name Dictionary.” In this article, we show information about colour names which have never been mentioned in any international journal until now, and we describe the method we used to identify them with physical colours. The method is exemplified on 10 colour names. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 38, 229–234, 2013.