For light, as in other settings, the scattering cross section for particles is generally different from the geometrical cross section of the particle, and it depends upon the wavelength of light and the permittivity, shape, and size of the particle. The total amount of scattering in a sparse medium is proportional to the product of the scattering cross section and the number of particles present.
In the interaction of light with particles, many processes occur, each with their own cross sections, including absorption, scattering, and photoluminescence. The sum of the absorption and scattering cross sections is sometimes referred to as the attenuation or extinction cross section.
The total extinction cross section is related to the attenuation of the light intensity through the Beer–Lambert law, which says that attenuation is proportional to particle concentration:
where  is the attenuation at a given wavelength ,  is the particle concentration as a number density, and  is the path length. The absorbance of the radiation is the logarithm (decadic or, more usually, natural) of the reciprocal of the transmittance :
Combining the scattering and absorption cross sections in this manner is often necessitated by the inability to distinguish them experimentally, and much research effort has been put into developing models that allow them to be distinguished, the Kubelka-Munk theory being one of the most important in this area.