Colours are all around us and they affect our daily lives, but what exactly are they and what is their function? A closer look at colours raises many questions: Can colour be measured? How does changing illumination affect the perception of colours? What is colour harmony? Do colours affect our emotions? Colours in the Visual World provides answers to these and other questions. It inspires the reader to discover and creatively use colour by tapping artistic knowledge and recent findings of perceptual science. Colours in the Visual World is a resource of colour facts and phenomena for students of art, design, and architecture, as well as all those interested in the world of colour. The book is based on the author’s over 20 years of experience in teaching, researching and creating with colour. Each chapter includes assignments that serve as a starting point for independent study and experimentation. A glossary helps to clarify colour concepts and terminology.

How the perception of shadows, studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. In The Visual World of Shadows, Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh examine how the perception of shadows, as studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. Shadows are at once a massive problem for vision—which must distinguish them from objects or material features of objects—and a resource, signaling the presence, location, shape, and size of objects. Casati and Cavanagh draw up an inventory of information retrievable from shadows, showing their amazing variety. They present an overview of the visual system, distinguishing between measurement and inference. They discuss the shadow mission, the work done by the visual brain to parse, and perhaps discard, the information from shadows; shadow ownership, the association of a shadow with the object that casts it; shadow labeling, the visual system's ability to tell shadows from nonshadows; and the shadow concept, our knowledge about shadows as a category. Casati and Cavanagh then apply the theoretical apparatus they have developed for shadows to other phenomena: illumination, reflection, and transparency. Finally, they examine the art of the shadow, paying tribute to artists' exploration of shadow, analyzing a series of artworks (reproduced in color) from a rich and fascinating art historical corpus.

The Visual Biography of Color is a first chance at a second look at color, which is so often overlooked in every day living. While other books discuss the phenomenon of color from a cultural perspective, The Visual Biography of Color reveals color through time by using information graphics and other forms of data visualization to visually describe color's cultural role. The book moves the reader through the visible spectrum, as they turn the pages they exist inside of red, then orange, then yellow. In red, they encounter the evolution of red states in the U.S., the compilation of every red subway line in every major world city collapsed onto a single page, and they see a radiant wheel that displays every major song that has red in its title. As they continue to move through the book they'll read about how artists, musicians, and other great thinkers have considered individual colors. Color is vital as a communicating cultural mechanism. Instead of a pure revelation of conceit, the book embraces what one might consider high-brow and low-brow culture, embracing colloquialisms and idioms that reveal how deeply embedded the idea of color is in our color full world.

During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, two of the most significant theoretical works on color since Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura were written and published in Germany: Arthur Schopenhauer's On Vision and Colors and Philipp Otto Runge's Color Sphere. For Schopenhauer, vision is wholly subjective in nature and characterized by processes that cross over into the territory of philosophy. Runge's Color Sphere and essay "The Duality of Color" contained one of the first attempts to depict a comprehensive and harmonious color system in three dimensions. Runge intended his color sphere to be understood not as a product of art, but rather as a "mathematical figure of various philosophical reflections." By bringing these two visionary color theories together within a broad theoretical context—philosophy, art, architecture, and design—this volume uncovers their enduring influence on our own perception of color and the visual world around us.

We perceive color everywhere and on everything that we encounter in daily life. Color science has progressed to the point where a great deal is known about the mechanics, evolution, and development of color vision, but less is known about the relation between color vision and psychology. However, color psychology is now a burgeoning, exciting area and this Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emerging theory and research. Top scholars in the field provide rigorous overviews of work on color categorization, color symbolism and association, color preference, reciprocal relations between color perception and psychological functioning, and variations and deficiencies in color perception. The Handbook of Color Psychology seeks to facilitate cross-fertilization among researchers, both within and across disciplines and areas of research, and is an essential resource for anyone interested in color psychology in both theoretical and applied areas of study.

“A curator, a paintings conservator, a photographer, and a conservation scientist walk into a bar.” What happens next? In lively and accessible prose, color science expert Roy S. Berns helps the reader understand complex color-technology concepts and offers solutions to problems that occur when art is displayed, conserved, imaged, or reproduced. Berns writes for two types of audiences: museum professionals seeking explanations for common color-related issues and students in conservation, museum studies, and art history programs. The seven chapters in the book fall naturally into two sections: fundamentals, covering topics such as spectral measurements, metamerism, and color inconstancy; and applications, where artwork display, painting materials, and color reproduction are discussed. A unique feature of this book is the use of more than 200 images as its main medium of communication, employing color physics, color vision, and imaging science to produce visualizations throughout the pages. An annotated bibliography complements the main text with suggestions for further reading and more in-depth study of particular topics. Engaging, incisive, and absolutely critical for any scholar or student interested in color science, Color Science and the Visual Arts is sure to become a key reference for the entire field.

Goethe's ideas on colour and imagery crossed many borderlines: those of artistic processes and philosophical aesthetics, art history and colour theory, together with the science of perception. This investigation into his writings ranges across art from Antiquity, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, as well as exploring the centrality of these issues to Goethe's literary work. Questions find answers, but also raise new questions. This systematic sequence of essays, originally written between 1999 and 2011, appeals to readers in all these separate areas, while drawing together their essential coherence.

The investigation of what people understand and remember from rapidlypresented sequences of visual stimuli began in the late 1960s. In this book, prominent researchers approach the topic from psychological, neuropsychological, and electrophysiological perspectives. The investigation of what people understand and remember from rapidly presented sequences of visual stimuli began in the late 1960s. In this book prominent researchers approach the topic from psychological, neuropsychological, and electrophysiological perspectives. Specific issues include RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation), attentional blink, repetition blindness, and scene perception. The contributors review recent research on our ability to comprehend and remember pictures of objects and scenes, written words, and sentences when the visual stimuli are presented sequentially at rates of up to ten items per second. In short, the book is about our remarkably developed abilities to understand and remember the contents of very briefly presented material.ContributorsDaphne Bavelier, Veronika Coltheart, Helene Intraub, Nancy Kanwisher, Steven J. Luck, Nadine Martin, Mary C. Potter, Eleanor M. Saffran, Kimron L. Shapiro, Ewa Wojciulik, Jeremy M. Wolfe, Carol Yin