Computing the relevant colors which describe the color palette of paintings Nieves Gómez, Juan Luis Gómez Robledo, Luis Chen, Y. J. Romero Mora, Francisco Javier Color vision Paintings Discernible colors In this paper, we introduce an innovative parameter that allows us to evaluate the so-called “relevant colors” in a painting; in other words, the number of colors that would stand out for an observer when just glancing at a painting. These relevant colors allow us to characterize the color palette of a scene and, on this basis, those discernible colors that are colorimetrically different within the scene. We tried to carry out this characterization of the chromatic range of paints according to authors and styles. We used a collection of 4,266 paintings by 91 painters, from which we extracted various parameters that are exclusively colorimetric to characterize the range of colors. After this refinement of the set of selected colors, our algorithm obtained an average number of 18 relevant colors, which partially agreed with the total 11–15 basic color names usually found in other categorical color studies. 2024-01-09T10:41:58Z 2024-01-09T10:41:58Z 2020-02-20 journal article Vol. 59, No. 6 / 20 February 2020 / Applied Optics [https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.378659] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/86648 10.1364/AO.378659 eng open access Optica Publishing Group