About
I, Gerard Harbers, am developing this site as an early open color science initiative. Over the years, I have learned and created a lot of content about light & color: I wrote texts, programs, and software libraries and gave talks. I even designed and made electronic boards with light and color sensors and applications to use them.
It would be good to share some of it, as I learned quite a bit over time and discovered that color is a complex topic to understand, and that is the purpose of this site: to be an educational resource to learn more about and manage color. It's intended for anyone with a technical interest in the topic of color, such as students doing color projects, lighting designers, and photographers, to name a few.
It is a work in progress, so please be patient and return to the site later if you don't find what you need, and let me know what you like to see here. Currently, I am planning to provide the following content:
- A blog covering all aspects of advanced color management and color science, and general discussions about color, and human vision.
- A collection of (mostly) measured spectra, to use for educational purposes: for example, emission spectra of the sun and lamps, but also color book swatches (Munsell), and various color matching functions (CIE 1931, CIE 2005). You can download spectral values in various formats and with varying spectral domains to use, for example, in spreadsheets, to do your calculations, or use in other applications.
- Color & Illumination Engineering Javascript library, which can be used in web applications and to run your scripts in DENO, a modern TypesScript/JavasScript runtime. This library implements many algorithms for color evaluation, as recommended by the International Commission on Illumination, and many algorithms from other standardization organizations, such as the IES (Illumination Engineering Society). It uses spectral distributions of color only, instead of color coordinates. It is written in the Rust programming language, and implemented as a WebAssembly library, with Typescript and Javascript interfaces.
- CMX is a Spectral Color Management JavaScript library to manage International Color Consortium (ICC) color profiles.
- A collection of online web applications related to color vision and color measurement.