Colorfulness

Colorfulness is a perceptual attribute describing how rich or intense the colors of a scene or image appear to an observer. It reflects the viewer's impression of color variety and vividness, arising from the spectral content of the light and the surface materials.

The concept is distinct from luminance, which measures brightness, and from saturation or chroma, which describe color purity. A scene can be highly colorful without being very bright, and vice versa. Colorfulness tends to increase with a wider range of hues and with more saturated colors.

In science and image processing, colorfulness is quantified using perceptual scales or objective metrics. Methods typically transform image data into a color space with perceptual axes and summarize the dispersion and magnitude of color signals. One well-known approach is the Hasler and Süsstrunk colorfulness metric, which combines statistics of color channels to produce a single score.

Colorfulness also depends on viewing conditions, including illumination, viewing geometry, and observer adaptation. Context and surround can enhance or suppress perceived colorfulness through contrast and adaptation effects. In color appearance models such as CIECAM02, colorfulness is connected to stimulus attributes and viewing context.

Applications span art, photography, display technology, product design, and image quality assessment, where aiming for a particular colorfulness level influences palette choice, lighting design, and gamut expectations.