- Intensity:
- Measure of the flow of power emitted by a surface. Intensity is expressed in watts (W) per square meter. In other words, how much light is concentrated in an area. If two bulbs are reflecting onto the same surface with one burning at 100 W and another at 60 W, there is more intensity from the 100 W bulb because more energy is being transferred to the same area.
- Brightness:
- The attribute of a visual sensation according to which an area appears to emit more or less light.
- Luminance:
- Radiant power weighted by a spectral sensitivity function that is characteristic of vision. Luminance was created to describe scientifically why we experience different sensations towards objects with different brightnesses. Luminance is similar to intensity in that it is proportional to the physical power of the light source. For example: When we watch television, the sun appears to be brighter than a building or tree. It appears to be emitting more light so it has a greater luminance. But in reality, each pixel in the screen is emitting the same amount of energy, thus everything on the screen has equal intensity.
- Hue:
- The attribute of a visual sensation according to which an area appears to be similar to one of the perceived colors red, yellow, green and blue, or a combination of two of them. Obviously there are more colors in the world than simply red, green, yellow and blue. Hue is used to describe how a color is related to the primary colors it is made up of.
- Saturation:
- The colorfulness of an area judged in proportion to its brightness. An area that is twice as bright as a second area must have twice as much hue to have the same saturation.
- Colorfulness:
- Attribute of a visual sensation according to which an area appears to exhibit more or less of its hue. Colorfulness is simply how much of a certain color is in an area.
- Primary Colors:
- Colors that cannot be produced from other colors. These colors are Red, Blue and Green (RGB) and can be combined to make up any other color (aside from another primary). Other colors can be used as primaries but they will not be able to make up the entire spectrum of color. Only RGB can be combined to represent the whole spectrum.
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