Color Space Java Applets
General Idea
The general idea behind this project is to give people
(especially us computer science nerds) a better feel on
how different color spaces (or color models) relate, and how to find one's
way around in a specific color space.
Thus, I've made some decisions about what color spaces
to spend my time on:
RGB -- The
Red, Green, Blue color space. I chose it, because it seems
everyone uses it, especially in computer science, since that's what
monitors deal with.
HSV -- The
Hue, Saturation, Value color space. I chose it, because it is the only
main non-linear transformation from RGB, and because it is usually considered
the easiest to use to pick colors.
YIQ -- I don't
know what YIQ actually stands for, but this color space is the color space that
is used here in the U.S. to encode our color television signals. I added it for
some variety too -- it is usually considered a very unintuitive color space.
CIE Luv -- CIE
stands for International
Commission on Illumination (or Commision Internationale de l'Eclairage). CIE has
set up some "standard" things, such as standard observers and standard primaries, and
based some color systems upon them. I chose
this particular CIE color space, because it seems to be the most intuitive of the
CIE Lab & CIE Luv perceptually uniform color spaces.
Why java? So that all you people out there surfing can run this, mostly
independent of whatever you're sitting in front of, though obviously, the closer
your system comes to being able to allocate 24-bit colors in your browser, the
better this will all work for you.
What? You say you want source code.
Just click
here for that.
To use the applet below:
The general idea is that the top set of choices allow you to choose
multiple color spaces to run side-by-side that when you interact with one,
updates the other(s), so you can see how they relate to one another.
The bottom set of choices is the chance to play the Matching Game with a
color space, and attempt to match colors using that color space.
Choose what color spaces you want to interact with,
then press the button to run the
applet. You must choose at least 1 color space,
and no more than 4 (there's no way more than 4 will fit
on your screen -- 3 is tough for most screens).
OR, You can choose from the second set of choices, and
play the matching game (click here for information on
playing the matching game) with that color space.
Greg Thoenen's Home Page