Lighting & Material Interactions Flashcards

A textile designer notices that a carpet sample looks greener on the showroom floor than in the client's home. The most likely cause is:

Answer: Different light sources in each environment causing a metameric shift

Showroom and residential light sources often differ in spectral power distribution, causing metameric colors to shift in appearance.

Subsurface scattering is most relevant when predicting the color appearance of:

Answer: Translucent materials like marble, skin, or wax

Subsurface scattering occurs when light penetrates a material, scatters within it, and exits at a different point, creating the characteristic glow of translucent materials.

In the context of color-critical work environments, D50 is preferred over D65 as a viewing standard primarily because:

Answer: D50 more closely matches the color temperature of typical indoor printing environments

D50 (5000K) is the ISO standard for graphic arts viewing because it better matches the typical interior ambient light under which printed material is evaluated.

A glossy red tile and a matte red tile with the same colorant appear to have different saturations in bright sunlight. The glossy tile appears:

Answer: Less saturated than the matte tile due to specular highlights washing out the hue

Specular highlights on glossy surfaces are near-white and reduce the apparent chroma/saturation of the color, especially under direct bright light.

Iridescence in butterfly wings and some coatings is caused by:

Answer: Thin-film interference where light waves reflect off multiple layers and interact constructively or destructively

Iridescence results from thin-film optical interference, where the wavelength of light that reflects constructively shifts with viewing angle, changing the apparent color.

When illuminating a red object with a green light source only, the object will appear:

Answer: Nearly black, because the red pigment absorbs green wavelengths and reflects little light

A red pigment reflects red wavelengths and absorbs most others; under green-only illumination there is almost no red light to reflect, so the object appears very dark.

The 'TLCI' (Television Lighting Consistency Index) extends CRI concepts specifically for:

Answer: Evaluating light quality as a camera sensor perceives it, not as the human eye does

TLCI was developed because camera sensors have different spectral sensitivities than human eyes, so a high CRI source may still render colors poorly on video.