Quantifying color appearance visually and instrumentally

Color appearance can be measured visually or instrumentally. Visually, the color sample of interest is compared to similar samples from an atlas associated with an equally visually spaced color order system. The illumination, and thus chromatic adaptation, must be controlled, and simultaneous‐contrast effects must be avoided during the comparison. The task is thus quite different from the everyday evaluation of colors in a complex scene. If instrumental measurement is used, one of the recently developed models of chromatic adaptation must be combined with an appropriate model of color vision and an analytical description of an adequate uniform color space to provide measures of color appearance. Progress in solving these difficult problems, mostly documented in previous articles in this journal, is described in the present review article.