HCL color space

HCL (Hue-Chroma-Luminance) or LCh refers to any of the many cylindrical color space models that are designed to accord with human perception of color with the three parameters. Lch has been adopted by information visualization practitioners to present data without the bias implicit in using varying saturation.[1][2][3] They are, in general, designed to have characteristics of both cylindrical translations of the RGB color space, such as HSL and HSV, and the L*a*b* color space. Some conflicting definitions of the terms are:

  • A name for a cylindrical transformation of CIELuv (CIELChuv) employed by Ihaka (2003)[1] and adopted by Zeileis et al. (2009, 2020).[2][4] This name appears to be the one most commonly used in information visualization. Ihaka, Zeileis, and co-authors also provide software implementations and web pages to promote its use.[4]
  • A name for cylindrical CIELab (CIELChab), employed by chroma.js.
  • "HCL" designed in 2005 by Sarifuddin and Missaou, which is a transformation of whatever type of RGB color space is in use.[5]
  • HCT with tone as a synonym for luminance is then used within Material Design for its color system, using value ranges of 0–360°, 0–120+ and 0–100%, respectively.[6] Its hue and chroma come from CAM16, whereas tone is actually L* from CIELab.[7]
The sRGB gamut plotted within the cylindrical CIELCh color spaces. L is the vertical axis; C is the cylinder radius; h is the angle around the circumference. Left: CIELChab; right: CIELChuv
  1. ^ a b Ihaka, Ross (2003). "Colour for Presentation Graphics". In Hornik, Kurt; Leisch, Friedrich; Zeileis, Achim (eds.). Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISSN 1609-395X.
  2. ^ a b Zeileis, Achim; Hornik, Kurt; Murrell, Paul (2009). "Escaping RGBland: Selecting Colors for Statistical Graphics" (PDF). Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. 53 (9): 3259–3270. doi:10.1016/j.csda.2008.11.033.
  3. ^ Stauffer, Reto; Mayr, Georg J.; Dabernig, Markus; Zeileis, Achim (2015). "Somewhere over the Rainbow: How to Make Effective Use of Colors in Meteorological Visualizations". Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 96 (2): 203–216. Bibcode:2015BAMS...96..203S. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00155.1. hdl:10419/101098.
  4. ^ a b Zeileis, Achim; Fisher, Jason C.; Hornik, Kurt; Ihaka, Ross; McWhite, Claire D.; Murrell, Paul; Stauffer, Reto; Wilke, Claus O. (2020). "colorspace: A Toolbox for Manipulating and Assessing Colors and Palettes". Journal of Statistical Software. 96 (1): 1–49. arXiv:1903.06490. doi:10.18637/jss.v096.i01. S2CID 80628405.
  5. ^ Sarifuddin, M. & Missaoui, Rokia (2005). A New Perceptually Uniform Color Space with Associated Color Similarity Measure for Content-Based Image and Video Retrieval (PDF). Multimedia Information Retrieval Workshop, 28th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference. S2CID 17570716. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-02-20.. Abstract/long-form corrected report
  6. ^ Material Design 3: Defining colors with hue, chroma, and tone (HCT)
  7. ^ James O'Leary (2022-02-17). "The Science of Color & Design". Material Design Blog.