Social scientist looks at how the eye sees color

Variations in how people perceive colors and how those same colors appear on TV, computers and other media have confounded broadcasters, Web designers and printers trying to reproduce lifelike hues. A. Kimball Romney, UC Irvine social sciences research professor, has found a solution – a mathematical model that determines how the human eye sees color and allows it to be replicated in other formats. His model yields a 99.4 percent match, based on International Commission on Illumination standards.The study, published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was co-authored by Chuan-Chin Chiao of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.