Locus Filters: Theory and Application

Abstract

Recently, a theoretical framework was presented for designing colored filters called Locus Filters. Locus filters are designed so that any Wien-Planckian light, post filtering, is mapped to another Wien-Planckian light. Moreover, it was also shown that only filters designed according to the locus filter framework have this locus-to-locus mapping property. In this paper, we investigate how locus filters work in the real world. We make two main contributions. First, for daylights, we introduce a new daylight locus with respect to which a locus filter always maps a daylight to another daylight (and their correlated color temperature maps in analogy to the Wien-Planckian temperatures). Importantly, we show that our new locus is close to the standard daylight locus (but has a simpler and more elegant formalism). Secondly, we evaluate the extent to which some commercially available light balancing and color correction filters behave like locus filters.