Colour mapping

In the 1940’s, Richard Hunter introduced a tri-stimulus model, Lab, which is scaled to achieve near uniform spacing of perceived color differences. While Hunter’s Lab was adopted as the de facto model for plotting absolute color coordinates and differences between colors, it was never formally accepted as an international standard.

Thirty-one years later, the CIE published an updated version of Hunter’s Lab: CIELab. The correct way to pronounce it is “see-lab”, or “L-star, a-star, b-star,” but some applications and instruments simply call it L, A, B, or Lab.