Color

Color
Perception, performance and preference


"They'll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particulargreen, never." Pablo Picasso, 1966.

As humans, our color vision influences on all instance of our lives from art and poetry to the color that we decide to paint our homes and the clothing that wedecide to wear. Although this is the case, we rarely question the mechanisms that helps us perceive color or even those that we cannot see.
An eye fundamentally “sees” by the use of photoreceptors whichconvert light into nerve signals. Color vision is due to a certain class of specialized photoreceptors that not only detect light, but detect and distinguish specific wavelengths of light (colors).These color photoreceptors, often called cones, are attuned to different color wavelengths by way of pigments known as photopigments. One of the fundamental components of these photopigments is a typeof protein called an opsin, which has the primary role of tuning color photoreceptors to specific wavelengths of light. Though each type of color-specific photoreceptor can detect a limited range ofcolors, each is most responsive to a specific wavelength of light, referred to as its absorption maxima (Green, 2005).

Human Vision and Color Perception (Spring, Fellers, Davidson, 2003)

Inthe depths of our eyes specialized cells are in charged of detecting the longitudes of our spectrum. This cells, primarily rods and cones, attune to different elements of the solar light spectrum whichis then transformed into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain through the optic nerves. The brain is the one in charge of making sense of the perception of color.
The cones are foundin a near by region of the center of the retina called fovea. Its distribution follows an angle of approximately two degrees from the fovea. The quantity of the cones is of six million and some of...