AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON OF RGB, YIQ, LAB, HSV, AND OPPONENT COLOR MODELS

The increasing availability of affordable color raster graphics displays has made it important to develop a better understanding of how color can be used effectively in an interactive environment. Most contemporary graphics displays offer a choice of some 16 million colors; the user's problem is to find the right color. Folklore has it that the RGB color space arising naturally from color display hardware is user-hostile and that other color models such as the HSV scheme are preferable. Until now there has been virtually no experimental evidence addressing this point. We describe a color matching experiment in which subjects used one or two tablet-based input techniques, interfaced through one of five color models, to interactively match target colors displayed on a CRT.