The present work intends to bring a new approach to the creation of target colorations in pigment research and development. Rather than proposing a “chemist's” approach, i.e. based on knowledge of the accessible energy levels of the electrons in matter whose transfer will produce absorption phenomena, we propose here, “without any compositional guide”, to establish the spectra corresponding to the 6 main colors (red-green-blue-cyan-magenta-yellow): the created spectra for the modeling are created without trying to correspond to any specific composition. Hence, we propose herein a “process” which can be directly transferred to experimental spectra associated with experimental compounds, whatever their nature: organic or inorganic, metallic, semi-conducting or insulating, etc. Since “out of all compositional guide” does not mean “unrealistic”, we have first shown that inorganic pigments, which are made up of absorption phenomena associated with the three main types of electronic transfer, can be robustly simulated in absorbance space by a linear combination of Gaussian functions. Briefly, this work led us to show several interesting conclusions in successive stages: • A single phenomenon can already create yellow, magenta, and blue colors with very good agreement, • All colors can be created with two-Gaussian spectra, • Very different spectra can lead to the same coloration (metamerism, which is already largely documented in literature). We showed that these “metameric” spectra then have properties of robustness (maintenance of coloration) for a change of the illuminant or a shift in the energy position of the absorption bands, which can be highly variable. Some colorations are intrinsically more robust than others to these environmental changes.
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