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Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology pp 1086–1090Cite as

Psychologically Pure Colors

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Synonyms

Psychological primary colors

Definition

Psychologically pure colors are colors that exhibit a homogeneous appearance on some dimension of perceived color. Purity of appearance is closely tied up with theoretical understandings of the three canonical color attributes of hue, saturation, and lightness. According to the dominant Hering opponent color framework, the hues red, green, blue, and yellow are distinctive and fundamental to all hue perception, in part due to the fact that they admit of pure or unique variants and all other hues (such as orange) appear as mixtures of them. Saturation and related notions are characterized essentially in terms of purity, involving judgments regarding differences in the appearance of chromatic stimuli and achromatic stimuli. Highly saturated colors appear to have low achromatic content or to be more intensely chromatic. In the achromatic domain, the lightness dimension runs from light to dark. The corresponding extreme ends of that...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach, MHB-9th Floor, Long Beach, CA, 90840, USA

    Wayne Wright

Authors
  1. Wayne Wright
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Correspondence to Wayne Wright .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Modern, Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Ming Ronnier Luo

  2. School of Design, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Ming Ronnier Luo

  3. Graduate Institute of Colour and Illumination, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Ming Ronnier Luo

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Wright, W. (2016). Psychologically Pure Colors. In: Luo, M.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8071-7_78

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