Edwin H Land’s Contributions to Colour Science

The seventh T H Morton Memorial Lecture presented to the Society’s London Region on 20th November 1985. Over the past 30 years Edwin H Land and his colleagues have been conducting studies outside the mainstream of colour vision research. Although their conclusion that spectrophotometers cannot categorise the colours of objects is undoubtably false, their studies have revealed that the remarkable phenomenon of the constancy of surface colours under highly chromatic illuminants has still not been explained, in spite of having been under investigation for almost a century. Their retinex theory is an attempt to do this; it had not yet been subjected to experiments specially designed to prove it wrong. If the theory does emerge successfully, there should be no difficulty in incorporating it into current colour vision theory, which is far from being complete