Color balance

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In graphics, color balance is the term for the dynamic range of the colors in an image. In artworks in general, the color palette can be selected by the artist to convey a mood or an impression.

In image processing, color balance often refers to the modification of the color values of an image to generate the correct colors on a particular image display or printing device.

A related image process is color mapping, the mapping of the distribution of colors in each pixel of the image to lie within the 8-bit range (256 colors in any given image) of older computer display or image storage formats. Although the visual system of a human being can distinguish many more colors than a camera or a photograph, the subtleties can be satisfactorily simulated by artful color balance of the palette in any given image.

Some implementations of color balance use histogram equalization.

Color balance is frequently a hardware or software feature of cameras and also of image manipulation programs like The Gimp and Photoshop.

A similar compression, not in color space but in the perception of acoustic information, can be seen in psychoacoustics.