Visual comfort of a colored image of an ordinary scene was investigated in terms of the number of categorical colors contained in the image. The categorical colors were extracted by presenting the image for 5 s and asking the observer to report all the colors perceived in the image by using categorical color naming. It was found that the number of categorical colors obtained had a high negative correlation with the observer＇s direct estimation of visual comfort for the image. This indicates that the more colors an image contains, the less comfort for the image is felt, and suggests that visual comfort can be evaluated as a function sir the number of categorical colors. The number of categorical colors was also determined colorimetrically and had a high negative correlation to the observer＇s direct estimation of visual comfort as well. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.