Spectrometers

Spectrometers are devices that collect and measure the amount of light that a color gives off, and gives us a number to represent the intensity of the color. It works by measuring the intensity of the color and how it absorbs the light to give off a color.

Today, we did a sort of lab where we chose a color and used a spectrometer to measure how much light is given off with each type of colored light- Blue, Cyan, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, Deep Red, and four interred lights. Then, we did the same thing on a white color, and divided the original results with those results to get results that could form a sort of spectrum.

I didn't really know what to expect, so I didn't get any unexpected results for my data. Looking at the other data samples, I didn't do anything wrong, so nothing was too unexpected.

We used different printers to print out the colors to use with the spectrometer. When our teacher put all of our spectrums next to each other, I found out that the other printers made the results a little bit different for Cyan, with a steeper or less steep slope and different results. The graphs, though, generally had the same shape, so the printers only changed the height of the spectrum.

In my opinion, hex codes have more relation to RGB than CMYK, because the RGB values match up with the hex codes values directly. What I mean by that is the Red value coincides with the first two numbers of the hex code- the 00 in #00FFFF. The Green value coincides with the second two- the 00 in #FF00FF. The Blue value coincides with the last two numbers- the 00 in #FFFF00. So, RGB has more in common with the hex codes than CMYK to me.

I think that spectrometry is important for publishers with color in their articles or other works, because they need to know specifically what colors they're using so that they can use that specific color in a printer. Some publishers are limited in the number of colors they can use, so a malfunction or misuse of a spectrometer could be disastrous. If no spectrometer is used, the colors in the actual printed newspaper or other type of media could be off, and mess the article up.

So, in conclusion, spectrometers are important. :)