Lighting CAD: color management

The software commonly used to verify the lighting designs and the photorealistic renderings still has shortcomings when it comes to color. Typically, light and materials are defined in terms of relative RGB color spaces, rather than relying on radiometric data. Further, the calculations lack a descriptive model of the human visual system that considers the perceptual adaptation effects. A long-standing open problem in the Lighting CAD is the definition of the colors of the materials that come into play in the environment, whether indoor or outdoor, which is the subject of lighting design. In this article, we address this problem with a theoretical and practical approach that allows you to use even non-homogeneous materials taken from real samples in the best way, instead of photos downloaded from the Internet, whose color reliability is generally unknown.