Bezold effect evaluation through the design of an interactive desktop application

Abstract

At the end of XIX century Bezold described a Chevreul discovered effect named inverse contrast, expansion effect or Bezold effect. Recently, Tortajada, Montalvá and Aguilar have quantified it using Ronchi patterns represented on paper. In this work an interactive desktop application, which leads to a fast and efficient observer input measurement over Bezold variable color, spin and angle stripes, is presented. The new application's interface has two identical white circles on a neutral background. The samples to be compared appear inside them, both with the same chromatic values but in one there is a Bezold effect (due to Ronchi's grating) and in the other there is not (due to a solid concentric circle), so the observer will try to match each other. As a result we get, for each pair, the variation of L carried out to compensate the effect, and this variation is used to indicate the value of the Bezold effect for that sample.