Report on the 3-D colour Mondrian project: Reflectance, illumination, appearance and reproduction

Abstract The CREATE project included interdisciplinary research on appearance and scene rendering. The technological advances in digital imaging allow renditions of real scenes that were not possible in conventional silver-halide photography. This project studied the goals and performance of image making techniques. The project included psychophysics, fine-art painting, digital photography and image processing. The project studied the rendition of the same objects in different illuminations. The psychophysics measured the appearance of the objects; the painting measured how an artist would render the scenes; the photography showed how cameras capture scenes; and the image processing compressed the High-Dynamic Range (HDR) scene into a Low-Dynamic-Range (LDR) picture. In artificial test targets using flat displays, the appearance of coloured surfaces remains nearly constant when the illuminant is uniform over the flat surface.. As well, the range of light reflected by artists’ paints and conventional photographic prints fits the range of such test scenes. All these facts are different with 3-D objects, non-uniform illumination, shadows, and different spectral illuminants. Illumination can create HDR scenes that far exceed the range of reproduction media. This project studied the mechanisms used by humans to sense real-life scenes, and the best image processing techniques to render them in reproductions. These processing techniques require spatial comparisons similar to those found in human vision. This paper has an accompanying website: http://web.me.com/mccanns/McCannImaging/3-D_Mondrians.html