Many readers of Color Research and Application are familiar with the first edition of Boynton's Human Color
The Visual stimulus, The Eye: Anatomy underlying perception of form and color, Visual pigments, Spectral sen-Vision (1979, reprinted, 1992). Those of us who teach and conduct research on color vision have used the book sitivity, and color matching, Sensitivity regulation, The Encoding of color, Chromatic discrimination, Temporal in many ways: as a gateway for students into the research literature, as a source of demonstrations and examples to and spatial factors in color vision, and Color vision variations. Each of these chapters is divided into several major use in our own teaching about color, and as a reference book to refresh our memories on important historical or and minor subsections, with a short summary and notes at the end. They are each rather complete on their own conceptual details of color vision. Although it covers a wide range of topics, a virtue of the original edition is and could be read individually or in some alternate order according to one's particular background or interests. that it was written by a single very knowledgeable author, rather than by a collection of individual specialists. This
There are separate indexes of names and topics that make the book very useful as a reference text even though resulted in a consistent style throughout, with clear explanations of the many complicated aspects of color vision the authors caution that it is, ''not a reference work that attempts to represent a complete compendium of color as they were understood in the late 1970s. Even students without strong math backgrounds found this book to be science and color vision research.'' Although it is not comprehensive, this book is compre-accessible, because there were few equations and the text was written in such a way that all the explanations could hensible. Readers are directed to the most influential pribe understood without knowing linear algebra.
mary literature but the in-text citation lists are short, mak-There are few people who have the requisite combinaing sentences easy to read and arguments easy to follow. tion of breadth and depth of knowledge to write such a
Approximately 340 new references are included in the book, or to revise one, so it is fortunate that, following current edition, though not all of these are from the 1980s Robert Boynton's retirement from vision work in 1991, and 1990s; several older references have been added, too. Peter Kaiser took on the challenge of integrating into the This book would be an excellent choice to use in an new edition the numerous recent advances in color vision introductory graduate course on vision (to be suppleresearch. As explained in the preface to the second edimented by primary research articles) and I have recomtion, Kaiser, at Boynton's insistence, originally set out to mended it to motivated undergraduates. Persons who are do the revision alone, but Boynton was gradually drawn involved with the artistic or commercial production of back into the project and ultimately the revision became color may find it useful, too. On the other hand, readers a collaboration. (I am reminded of Michael Jordan rewho are not seriously interested in learning about color turning to basketball after his retirement in that other vision research may think that the book is too dense. ''field''!)
Compared to other textbooks of the mid 1990s, this one The second edition retains the qualities that made the lacks glitz. The few color illustrations have not been uporiginal so successful. It is a research-based textbook of dated and they may seem a bit old fashioned to students color vision, with a strong emphasis on psychophysics, who are used to fancy computer graphics. Some of the without much math. It is clearly written, but as in the other figures which have been reproduced from older original, the authors have carefully avoided lies of overstudies are readable but lack clarity. Despite this shortsimplification. The second edition is 200 pages longer coming, the original color plates still serve to illustrate than the first edition and it includes a new chapter, Namtheir points effectively as do the demonstrations and ating, ordering, and recognizing surface colors, which home experiments suggested in the text. Those interested deals with a variety of topics such as surface reflectance, in fancier illustrations should be directed to Peter Kaiser's color order systems, color naming research (particularly World Wide Web book: Joy of Visual Perception.