White point

A white point (often referred to as reference white or target white in technical documents) is a set of tristimulus values or chromaticity coordinates that serve to define the color "white" in image capture, encoding, or reproduction. Depending on the application, different definitions of white are needed to give acceptable results. For example, photographs taken indoors may be lit by incandescent lights, which are relatively orange compared to daylight. Defining "white" as daylight will give unacceptable results when attempting to color-correct a photograph taken with incandescent lighting.

An illuminant is characterized by its relative spectral power distribution. The white point of an illuminant is the chromaticity of a white object under the illuminant, and can be specified by chromaticity coordinates, such as the x, y coordinates on the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram (hence the use of the relative SPD and not the absolute SPD, because the white point is only related to color and unaffected by intensity).

Illuminant and white point are separate concepts. For a given illuminant, its white point is uniquely defined. A given white point, on the other hand, generally does not uniquely correspond to only one illuminant. From the commonly used CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram, it can be seen that almost all non-spectral colors (all except those on the line of purples), including colors described as white, can be produced by infinitely many combinations of spectral colors, and therefore by infinitely many different illuminant spectra.

Although there is generally no one-to-one correspondence between illuminants and white points, in the case of the CIE D-series standard illuminants, the spectral power distributions are mathematically derivable from the chromaticity coordinates of the corresponding white points.

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