Color is an important part of the visual arts.

Normalized typical human cone responses (and the rod response) to monochromatic spectral stimuli

The orange disk on the left has exactly the same objective color as the brown disk on the right; based on context differences, humans may interpret them as different colors.

The CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram. The outer curved boundary is the spectral (or monochromatic) locus, with wavelengths shown in nanometers. Note that the colors depicted depend on the color space of the device on which you are viewing the image, and therefore may not be a strictly accurate representation of the color at a particular position, and especially not for monochromatic colors.

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Color (or colour, see spelling differences) is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, yellow, white, etc. more...

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Color derives from the spectrum of light (distribution of light energy versus wavelength) interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects, materials, light sources, etc., based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra.

Typically, only features of the composition of light that are detectable by humans (wavelength spectrum from 400 nm to 700 nm, roughly) are included, thereby objectively relating the psychological phenomenon of color to its physical specification. Because perception of color stems from the varying sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

The science of color is sometimes called chromatics. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range (that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light).

Physics of color

Electromagnetic radiation is characterized by its wavelength (or frequency) and its intensity. When the wavelength is within the visible spectrum (the range of wavelengths humans can perceive, approximately from 380 nm to 740 nm), it is known as "visible light."

A given light source may emit light at many different wavelengths (and most do); its spectrum is then a distribution giving its intensity at each wavelength. Although the spectrum of light arriving at the eye from a given direction determines the color perceived in that direction, there are many more possible spectral combinations than color sensations. In fact, one may formally define a color as a class of spectra that give rise to the same color sensation, although such classes would vary widely among different species, and to a lesser extent among individuals within the same species. In each such class the members are called metamers of the color in question.

Spectral colors

The familiar colors of the rainbow in the spectrum – named for the Latin word for appearance or apparition by Isaac Newton in 1671 – include all those colors that can be produced by visible light of a single wavelength only, the pure spectral or monochromatic colors. The color table at right shows approximate frequencies (in terahertz) and wavelengths (in nanometers) for various pure spectral colors. The wavelengths are measured in vacuum (see refraction).