Coating a printed surface with a smooth transparent layer can modify its color. This is due to light interreflections within the coating layer which produce a halo-shaped point spread function. The change of color is related to the coating thickness and the halftone screening used for printing. Thanks to an optical model able to predict the spectral reflectance of the coated print from the one of the non-coated print, we propose to study the impact of the halftone pattern (shape and profile) on the color change caused by the coating layer. It was found that line halftone patterns with a crenel profile induces the strongest changes of color. This is therefore the pattern that we use for an innovative application of this phenomenon: revealing a binary image by adding or removing a coating layer on the print that is originally uniform.
The iridescence effect, produced by structural color, is difficult (if not impossible) to capture and print using traditional CMYK pigments. RGB pigments, nonetheless, generate structural colors by light interference. The layered surface structure generated by pigments’ particles reflects different wavelengths of light in different viewing angles. In printed media, pigments’ particles will collectively influence the optical response of the surface, depending on their size, orientation, structure, and dimensions, ultimately, affecting the visual characteristics of the image perceived by the observer. In this work, we have studied the influence of different halftones’ structures on printed images, produced with RGB inks via screen printing. We investigated the influence of different halftones’ structures in creating different spatial combinations of inks on the printed surface that reproduce the characteristics of iridescent effect of a headdress made of quetzal feathers. We applied first-order, second-order, and structure-aware FM halftones to compare how they influence the reproduction of the material qualities of the object represented in the image. The results show that the structure-ware halftones improve the representation of the image structures and details and, therefore, it could better convey the 3D surface features that produce iridescence effect in the original feathers of the headdress.
Lightness Illusions (Contrast, Assimilation, and Natural Scenes with Edges and Gradients) show that Lightness appearances do not correlate with the light sent from the scene to the eye. Illusions modify “the-rest-of-the-scene” to make two identical-luminance Gray segments appear different from each other. Scene segments have two properties in human vision: apparent Lightness, and apparent Uniformity. Models of vision have two scene-dependent processes that spatially transform scene luminances. The first is optical veiling glare that modifies the sharpness of the edges, and replaces uniform scene segments with low-slope gradients. The second scene-dependent transformation is neural spatial processing. This means that this spatial transformation has many tasks to perform in generating appearances. They include: making edges appear sharp; making gradients in scene segments appear uniform; and compensating for glare’s many local redistributions of light. In short, neural spatial processing does an excellent job of ignoring glare’s distortions of scene luminance. In fact it over compensates glare in a way that generates appearances reported in Contrast Illusions, B&W Mondrians, and Checkershadow Illusions.
Gloss perception is a complex psychovisual phenomenon, whose mechanisms are not yet fully explained. Instrumentally measured surface reflectance is usually poor predictor of human perception of gloss. The state-of-the-art studies demonstrate that, in addition to surface reflectance, object's shape and illumination geometry also affect the magnitude of gloss perceived by the human visual system (HVS). Recent studies attribute this to image cues – the specific regularities in image statistics that are generated by a combination of these physical properties, and that, in their part, are proposedly used by the HVS for assessing gloss. Another study has recently demonstrated that subsurface scattering of light is an additional factor that can play the role in perceived gloss, but the study provides limited explanation of this phenomenon. In this work, we aimed to shed more light to this observation and explain why translucency impacts perceived gloss, and why this impact varies among shapes. We conducted four psychophysical experiments in order to explore whether image cues typical for opaque objects also explain the variation of perceived gloss in translucent objects and to quantify how these cues are modulated by the subsurface scattering properties. We found that perceived contrast, coverage area, and sharpness of the highlights can be combined to reliably predict perceived gloss. While sharpness is the most significant cue for assessing glossiness of spherical objects, coverage is more important for a complex Lucy shape. Both of these observations propose an explanation why subsurface scattering albedo impacts perceived gloss.
In this study, the brightness matching experiment was conducted to obtain the equivalent luminance between chromatic and achromatic colors. Observers adjusted the luminance of achromatic colors until achromatic colors were perceived as having the same brightness with chromatic colors. A total of 285 chromatic colors having three different luminance levels, 30cd/m^2, 95cd/m^2, and 300cd/m^2 were used as the test colors. Twenty observers participated in this experiment repeating three times. The results showed that the brightness-to-luminance (B/L) ratio, where brightness means the luminance of achromatic color, increases as CIE 1976 saturation increases in all luminance levels indicating the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect. Also, as the luminance level of chromatic color increases, B/L ratio decreases. It is found that the existing color appearance models predicting the H-K effect overestimate the brightness increment by chroma compared to our new heterochromatic brightness matching data set.
