Talk:Brightness

Comment

This page is incorrect. It misses completely the use of brightness as a term in astronomy used to discuss the irradiance or radiant emittance from a star and measured in W/m^2.

Brightness is correctly defined as a lowercase b and is equal to the luminosity of the star, L, divided by 4 * pi * r^2 where r is the distance from the star to the surface the brightness is being measured.

This is a similar problem with luminosity, as astronomy and color theory both claim the same words. I.m.o., make a disambiguation page for the definition in astronomy. 217.122.183.107 (talk) 17:04, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Brightness is also a technical term used in the paper industry, where it apparently means something like luminance. The three standards for defining and measuring it are TAPPI Standard T451 (more commonly known as GE), ISO Standard 2469 (or ISO for short) and something called D65. When you buy a ream of copier paper in the USA, the label will have something like: "Domtar First Choice MultiUse Copy Paper - Legal - 8.5" x 14" - 24lb - Smooth - 98 GE/114 ISO Brightness - 5000 / Carton - White" In the TAPPI method, nearly all uv is filtered out of the grading lamps, while the ISO standard simulates daylight. The Optical Brightening Agents in white paper exhibit very strong blue fluorescence. In the paper industry, brightness is measured in a 40 nm band centered around 457 nm. This is how paper can have an albedo greater than 100%. Zyxwv99 (talk) 15:24, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Federal standard relevance

Does that (old version of a) federal telecommunications standard in reference 2 really matter that much? From a quick survey it seems that there are other accepted definitions in colorimetry and photometry of lightness and brightness.

Also see Talk:Lightness - Ridiculous youtube reference , I don't think these articles were made by competent people.

Gabrolf (talk) 15:07, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

It seems a contradiction in the entry to say that it is both "subjective" and also "absolute," which implies perfect objectivity. The author seems to be confusing "brightness," which describes something perceived, with "luminance," which is a measure of the amount light reflected or emitted by a surface, which we can measure with instruments. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gitchygoomy (talk • contribs) 07:25, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree, the article contradicts itself.

Subject(s) of this article

For better or worse, this articles covers several completely different topics. North8000 (talk) 16:58, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Removed some irellevant info and corrected others

Nevertheless, more work to be done. This page really should be associated with colorimetry and color science as "brightness" is a perceptual quality, as is lightness/darkness.

If discussing light in physics, a more appropriate term in many cases is luminance. Luminance is light, spectrally weighted per human vision, however luminance is linear relative to light, but not linear relative to human perception. For discussing human perception, the terms lightness (L* or J) or brightness (Q) are used.Myndex (talk) 02:09, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Brightness

What is brightness 42.109.238.23 (talk) 02:17, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

SI photometry quantities

The SI photometry quantities are impossible to follow unless you already know what lumens and lux are. Could somebody please put these units into SI units like watts/m2/steradian? Geoffrey.landis (talk) 16:32, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

radiating/reflecting

using a slash in the opening sentence feels like someone wrote the rough draft and forgot to come back and tighten it up. does the lay visitor to the page know what both those things mean? if there's something in common between the two, why not just say *that* instead?

no one's been on this talk page in over a year, so just putting this out here for a bit. I'll be bold shortly and just fixit. ~2025-32372-45 (talk) 17:18, 10 November 2025 (UTC)