The Rainbow Color Scales Tool

Introduction

Rainbow is a tool for studying perceptually uniform color scales. Given two colors chosen by the user, Rainbow creates color scales by interpolating between the end colors in RGB and CIELUV spaces, and displays the scales side by side for comparison and study. It can also display a plot of the luminance (L*), chroma (C*), or hue (huv) of each scale instead of showing the colors. This is useful for comparing the linearity of the two scales on each parameter (however, being just a polar form of the CIELUV space, L*C*Huv is only an approximation to a perceptually uniform color space).

[Click on the figures below for the full-size version.]

Figure 1. Segmented color scales.

Figure 2. Continuous color scales joined together.

Figure 3. A plot of the L*C*huv chroma of two color scales.


Young Hyun
Last modified: Thu Jan 17 16:36:55 PST 2002