Dictionary Pods Tag: Brightness

Amplitude, brightness, colour brightness & intensity

About amplitude, brightness, colour brightness and intensity

The terms amplitude, brightness, colour brightness and intensity are easily confused. In this resource:

Amplitude
Brightness
  • Brightness refers to a property of light, to how strong a light source or light reflected off an object appears to be.
  • Brightness is related to how things appear from the point of view of an observer.
    • When something appears bright it seems to radiate or reflect more light or colour than something else.
    • Brightness may refer to a light source, an object, a surface, transparent or translucent medium.
    • The brightness of light depends on the intensity or the amount of light an object emits( eg. the Sun or a lightbulb).
    • The brightness of the colour of an object or surface depends on the intensity of light that falls on it and the amount it reflects.
    • The brightness of the colour of a transparent or translucent medium depends on the intensity of light that falls on it and the amount it transmits.
    • Because brightness is related to intensity, it is related to the amplitude of electromagnetic waves.
    • Brightness is influenced by the way the human eye responds to the colours associated with different wavelengths of light. For example, yellow appears relatively brighter than reds or blues to an observer.
Colour Brightness
  •  Colour brightness refers to how colours appear to a human observer in terms of the lightness or darkness of colours.

So colour brightness can refer to the difference between how a colour appears to an observer in well-lit conditions and its subdued appearance when in shadow or when poorly illuminated.

  • In a general sense, brightness is an attribute of visual perception and produces the impression that something is radiating or reflecting light and/or colour.
  • Colour brightness increases as lighting conditions improve, whilst the vitality of colours decreases when a surface is poorly lit.
  • Optical factors affecting colour brightness include:
    • The angle at which incidence light approaches a medium, object or surface
    • The composition of incident light in terms of wavelength and frequency
    • The polarization of incident light
  • Material properties affecting the colour brightness of a medium, object or surface include:
    • Chemical composition
    • Three-dimensional form
    • Texture
    • Reflectance
  • Perceptual factors affecting colour brightness include:
Intensity
    • Intensity refers to the amount of light produced by a light source or the amount of light that falls on a particular area of the object.
    • So intensity measures the energy carried by a light wave or stream of photons:
      • When light is modelled as a wave, intensity is directly related to amplitude.
      • When light is modelled as a particle, intensity is directly related to the number of photons present at any given point in time.
      • Light intensity falls exponentially as the distance from a point light source increases.
      • Light intensity at any given distance from a light source is directly related to its power per unit area (when the area is measured on a plane perpendicular to the direction of propagation of light).
      • The power of a light source describes the rate at which light energy is emitted and is measured in watts.
      • The intensity of light is measured in watts per square meter (W/m2).
      • Cameras use a light meter to measure the light intensity within an environment or reflected off a surface.

Brightness

About brightness
  • In this resource, the term brightness is associated with the intensity of light an object such as the Sun or a lightbulb emits.
  • In everyday experience, we often gauge the brightness of a light source subjectively, by comparing it with the brightness of other known light sources.
  • The brightness of a light can also be measured objectively using units like lumens or candela.
  • Light travelling through a vacuum is not visible until it interacts with something such as our eyes or an object that reflects the light towards us, enabling us to perceive its brightness.
  • The perceived brightness of a light source depends on the intensity and wavelength of the light and how the photoreceptive rod and cone cells in the human retina respond.
  • Brightness, when used in this way, is the same as luminance.
  • Luminance is a measure of the amount of light emitted, transmitted, or reflected from a particular area in a specific direction. It is used to quantify the intensity of light that is perceived by the human eye from a particular direction.
  • Our eye’s photoreceptors, especially the rod cells which are more sensitive to light intensity, play a crucial role in our perception of brightness. Rods are more abundant and distributed throughout the retina, and they function mainly in low light conditions to help us perceive the brightness or lightness of an object, but they can’t distinguish colour.
  • On the other hand, our perception of colour is based on how different wavelengths of light stimulate the three types of cone cells in our eyes. These cone cells are sensitive to short (S, which corresponds to blue), medium (M, corresponds to green), and long (L, corresponds to red) wavelengths of light. The combination of signals from these three types of cone cells allows us to perceive a broad spectrum of colours. Colour perception depends not just on the light’s intensity, but on its spectral composition – what mix of wavelengths it contains.