XYZ color space

The Commission Internationale de l’Éclairage (CIE) standards body created the CIE 1931 XYZ color space, which is graphed in the following figure. ¹

XYZ is a device-independent color space, which means that it does not describe the characteristics of a particular display or color measurement device. ¹

Meaning of X, Y, and Z

Y is the luminance, Z is quasi-equal to blue (of CIE RGB), and X is a mix of the three CIE RGB curves chosen to be nonnegative. ²

Computation

Given a spectral distribution , its XYZ color space coordinates are computed by integrating its product with the , , and spectral matching curves:

Footnotes

1. PBRT V4 4.6 Color Note ↩ ↩²

2. CIE 1931 color space - Wikipedia ↩