Which color is more colorful, the lighter one or the darker one?

Abstract

To answer a question often asked in industrial color reproduction, a series of highly chromatic color samples of the same CIELAB hue but of small variations of CIELAB chroma and lightness were prepared and scaled for perceived colorfulness. The results indicate that lightness contributes to the perceived colorfulness as defined by the observers according to their everyday color experiences. For the samples used, colorfulness can be modeled by factoring in the CIELAB L* value in addition to CIELAB C*. The results show that colorfulness, as implied in our everyday color experiences, can be a complex perceptual attribute. A newer psychophysical scaling model is also presented, since Thurstone's Case V model was shown to be inadequate. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.