A psychophysical approach to color sensory evaluation of yellowish natural dye fabrics

The objectives of this study were to evaluate color sensation for yellowish natural dye fabrics using magnitude estimation to determine physical colorimetric factors significantly related to human sensibility by establishing power function in psychophysical analysis. Fourteen different yellowish fabrics dyed with natural colorants were selected as stimuli. Subjective color sensations including brightness, heaviness, softness, strength, warmth, activeness, classicalness, femininity, and pleasantness for each stimulus were subjectively evaluated by using fixed magnitude estimation. As results, yellowish natural dye fabrics in general seemed to evoke feeling of brightness, femininity, and pleasantness more strongly than that of heaviness and classicalness. Most of color sensations were significantly related with more than one of physical color properties, which leads to establishing reliable power functions between them. Color lightness, L* was found as a dominant physical attribute which affects subjective sensation such as brightness, femininity, and pleasantness. Subjective activeness was explained by physical yellowness, b*, whereas both strength and classicalness were by color saturation, C* even though it described strength positively while it did classicalness negatively. In the power functions, these relationships could be utilized to design color-sensible natural dye textiles.