CIELAB Color Space & Coordinates Conversion

CIELAB is the mainstream color space coordinate system, which was defined by International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in 1976. CIELAB uses (L*, a*, b*) three coordinates to represent a human visual color.

There are '*' symbols attached with the three coordinates' letter, L, a, b, to distinguish the older Hunter Lab color space, which was defined by Dr. Richard S. Hunter in 1948, who is the founder of Hunter Associates Laboratory, Inc. Compared with XYZ Color Space, the colors represented by CIELAB color space has better linearity and closer to human's visual perception. Therefore, most of the colorimeter uses CIELAB color space today, instead of XYZ.

In addition to the above CIELAB color space, there are also other common color space in other application fields.

The RGB color model is commonly used  in display monitors and digital image design and webpage design (In HEX code). RGB color model comes from the light source of three primary colors red, green and blue. In addition, CMYK color space is commonly in printing industry, in which uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, four colors overprinting.

The above each color space has its position and range in the XYZ color space, with different degree of color and fineness to express a certain color. These color spaces can be converted to each other, by using formulas under the same white reference (D65, D50, A, C, D55, D75) and observer view angle (2°, 10°).

The below online converter provides you an easy-to-use calculator, and you can convert a coordinate of a color space into another, among RGB, CMYK, CIELAB, and XYZ.

Color Space Converter

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