Billmeyer and Saltzman's Principles of Color Technology

Roy S. Berns

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119366683
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Química industrial y técnica

This book offers detailed coverage of color, colorants, the coloring of materials, and reproducing the color of materials through imaging. It combines the clarity and ease of earlier editions with significant updates about the advancement in color theory and technology.

• Provides guidance for how to use color measurement instrumentation, make a visual assessment, set a visual tolerance, and select a formulation
• Supplements material with numerical examples, graphs, and illustrations that clarify and explain complex subjects
• Expands coverage of topics including spatial vision, solid-state lighting, cameras and spectrophotometers, and translucent materials

Chapter 1
Physical Properties of Colors

A. WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT?

This is a book about color, colorants, the coloring of materials including measurement and control, and reproducing the color of materials through imaging.

Color can mean many things. In this book, color may mean a certain kind of light, its effect on the human eye, or — most important of all — the result of this effect in the mind of the viewer. We describe each of these aspects of color, and relate them to one another.

Colorants, on the other hand, are purely physical things. They are the dyes and pigments used in the process of coloring materials.

Coloring is a physical process: that of applying dyes to textiles or incorporating, by dispersion, pigments into paints, inks, and plastics. A part of this book is devoted to describing these physical substances and processes.

But color is much more than something physical. Color is what we see—and we repeat this many times—it is the result of the physical modification of light by colorants as detected by the human eye (called a response process) and interpreted in the brain (called a perceptual process, which introduces psychology). This is an enormously complicated train of events. To describe color and coloring, we must understand something of each aspect of it. A large portion of the book deals with this problem.

With an understanding of color in this broad sense, we can approach some commercial problems involving color. These problems are concerned with answering such questions as, Does this sample have the same color as the one I made yesterday, or last week, or last year? Does this batch of material have the same color as a standard? Does this reproduced image match the original? How much of what colorants do I use to produce a color just like this one? How can I choose colorants that will perform satisfactorily in a certain application?

Historically, most of these questions have had only subjective answers, based on the skill and memory of the trained color matcher or press operator. Fortunately, through the application of the principles of color technology and the use of color measurement, we can provide objective answers. We consider the industrial application of color technology largely in this objective vein.

In summary, we provide a brief résumé of the present state of the art of color, color control, coloring, color reproduction, and colorants—a very complex field. To simplify, we have omitted much. Among our omissions are conflicting points of view: we tend to present our best current opinion rather than a studied evaluation of all sides of any question. Some topics that are important to include are still evolving; for these cases, we will present the general concepts rather than focus on a particular solution. We hope our readers will be stimulated to seek more detailed and more varied information on many of the subjects we touch upon only briefly.

To this end we provide—and consider of major importance—an annotated bibliography in which we identify those citations among all of our references that we consider key to the body of knowledge comprising color technology. We also provide an annotated list of recommended books to establish a color‐science library. We hope that our readers will recognize with us that this book can be no more than a beginning and that they will make use of its bibliography and book recommendations as a guide to the extensive and often complex literature on color.

This book is not a “how to” manual for any process or industry. It does not tell you the best way to make a beige shade in vinyl plastic at the lowest cost. Nor does it provide a detailed study of what ink amounts in a multi‐ink printer are necessary to reproduce the beige plastic. It does tell you in principle how to avoid having that beige go off‐shade in tungsten light; it does tell why different combinations of inks can match the beige.

This book is not an instrument manual or a catalog of instruments; it does not tell you how to operate any specific color‐measuring instrument—designed for a single color or many colors simultaneously—to measure samples of a given material. It does tell you what types of instruments are available and for what purposes they can or cannot be used. It does tell you how to make the best use of these instruments.

This book does not attempt to give the “best” ways to use color, the “best” ways to use colorants, or the “best” colorants to use for any application. These are important practical questions, but to answer them would require much more detail than can be put into this book. For these subjects, as for others we do not discuss, there are references to the literature.

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