Color Field: Developing Professional Vision by Visualizing the Effects of Color Filters

Color filters are ubiquitous across visual digital media due to their transformative effect. However, it can be difficult to understand how a color filter will affect an image, especially for novices. In order to become experts, we argue that novices need to develop Goodwin’s notion of Professional Vision [29]. Then, they can "see" and interpret their work in terms of their domain knowledge like experts. Using the theory of Professional Vision, we present two design objectives for systems that aim to help users develop expertise. These goals were used to develop Color Field, an interactive visualization of color filters as a vector field over the Hue-Saturation-Lightness color space. We conducted an exploratory user study in which five color grading novices and four experts were asked to analyze color filters. We found that Color Field enabled multiple strategies to make sense of filters (e.g. reviewing the overall shape of the vector field) and discuss them (e.g. using spatial language). We conclude with other applications of Color Field and future work to leverages Professional Vision in HCI.