Colour is an important source of information in the natural world. It can be used for distinguishing and identifying surfaces and objects and separating one region from another. For instance, flowers and grasses in a garden can be distinguished by their colours despite a change in illuminant. Intuitively, the identifiability of surfaces in a scene can be described by their volumes of colour gamuts. But is this approximation of the identifiability accurate? On the other hand, the existence of metamerism in natural scenes shows that colour is sometimes unreliable for surfaces identification. Estimating frequency of metamerism normally requires many comparisons between surface colours to determine their distinguishability under different illuminants. Is there a simpler approach to predict the frequency of metamerism in natural scenes? The aim of this thesis was to address these two questions about the identifiability of surfaces in natural scenes. To answer the first question, the volumes of colour gamuts were estimated over 50 natural scenes under different illuminants. The logarithm of the gamut volume was regressed on the differential entropy of colours. It was found that gamut volume can be an accurate approximation, given a colour difference threshold representing the visual distinguishability within an approximately perceptually uniform colour space. To answer the second question, the frequency of metamerism was estimated over 50 natural scenes with changes in illuminant; and predictive models were constructed based on different combinations of Shannon differential entropies of colours. There was strong dependence of the frequency of metamerism on the combination of the differential entropy and the conditional differential entropy of colours. It means that the frequency of metamerism can be predicted by the informational quantities of the colours in a scene.

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This paper gives a brief overview on the published and accepted standards and methods for colour photography and print lightfastness measuring and evaluating. A comparison of selected valid standards and evaluation suggestions has been made. Sample sets was produced by various photographic processes and printing techniques. Identical sample sets were used in both long-term and accelerated ageing experiment. In this thesis, the degradation speed is expressed as a formal rate constant, which was calculated from the dependence of normalized gamut volume on the exposure dose. Photographs and prints were compared on calculated lifetime basis. A failure of reciprocity law was observed, which indicates a lower credibility of estimated lifetime predictions based on accelerated ageing.

Inkjet printing technology became a popular technology for printing digital photographs in the last decade. There is a big variety of both original and alternative (cheaper) inks and print media for the consumers. But there is a question if the cheaper material provides also comparable printout quality. For this reason, it is important to test the properties of such inkjet printouts. There are several ways how to test the lightfastness of the printouts: long term storage under environmental conditions, or short, accelerated ageing tests. The stability of printouts is affected by many factors, such as ink-receiving layer, ink composition, UV and visible light intensity and air pollutants concentration in the environment. Some inkjet printouts exposed to light usually undergo surprisingly fast fading, but light is not the only dangerous condition for inkjet printout. The two types of test targets printed with dyebased inkjet inks on various paper types were subjected to both accelerated test in a xenon test chamber and light and environmental pollutants long-term test in a sunny indoor corridor. The values of light intensity were continuously monitored and samples properties were regularly measured with a spectrophotometer. Another type of testing included accelerated ozone ageing of inkjet dyes. The colour gamuts and gamut volumes were calculated from collected spectral data. Total colour difference E*ab was also evaluated, its increase served as a tool for finding the formal printout degradation rate constant. It was found out that the dyes in ink-receiving layers of printouts underwent significant degradation in all tested conditions. The degradation rate depended on the type of used print media. The reciprocity behaviour of printouts was also studied. Recent inkjet printouts testing miss some actual ISO norm which should show the way of effective lightfastness evaluation. One of the main aims of this work was to find some new and alternative ways of inkjet printouts lightfastness evaluation. The method of printed inks concentration determination from the test charts spectrophotometric measurements was also proposed.

It was investigated the colour reproduction on prints made in ink-jet printer. Experimentally investigated gradation characteristics of CMYK colours. It was made a 26 step strip with raster dots from 0 to 100 %. Prints were made at different printing regimes on papers with different whiteness. Zone optical densities were measured, compared with theoretical density values and gradational distortions were determined. Also were measured 100% raster strips in CIE L*a*b* coordinate system and defined the maximum reproduction of colours in ink-jet printer.