Color & Limitations

[BobDavid]

Back to thinking about color perception ... dogs see muted shades of blue and yellow, and a range of greys (K). Most humans see the visible light spectrum (R,G,B,C,M,Y, K), around 10% of the male population sees B,Y, K. I once knew a student studying studio art--oil painting. One day, we walked passed a house. I made a comment that I didn't think mauve suited the house. My buddy said, "It's grey." We argued until we asked a passerby (a lady in her 40s) to tell us the color. She said it was mauve (popular color in the 80s). I watched my buddy's heart sink. We didn't say much the rest of the way. I had noticed his paintings were gold, blue, brown yellow and devoid of reds and greens. Sometimes artists with red-green colorblindness will over compensate and use fluorescent greens and fuchsia. Incidentally, my buddy is now a successful sculptor.

By the way, I loved Tri-X.

[Telecaster]

The "visual spectrum" is very narrow. I wish I could flip an internal switch and see infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths. Or how about having, say, five wavelength peaks in our cone response instead of three?   

-Dave-

[BobDavid]

I'm with you there, Dave. But, we must make the best of how our limitations limit us.

[amolitor]

Color and the perception of it is a really interesting phenomenon.

Once you know how it really works, instead of kind of how it sort of works, you'll worry less about "getting it right" in your prints, because you will realize that it is impossible.

Color is a construct of our visual system, and, here's the important bit, every one of us constructs it just a little bit differently.

Having a color managed workflow, which is what most people will tell you that you TOTALLY NEED TO DO TO GET THE COLOR RIGHT, just manages the color after the camera has completely botched it up in the capture, so that what you see on your screen (which is nothing like the real original color) will generally tend to be perceived by an average viewer more or less in the same way after you print it on your calibrated profiled printer, which will in fact produce yet another color that is nothing like the original color.

Here's a fun game to try out:

Take a picture of some strongly colored objects. Now get these objects and put them next to your computer. Do whatever you do to get the color of one of the objects as close as you can to correct. Now check the other objects. Hold them up to the screen and compare the real, actual, color with the half-baked perceptual approximation the computer to showing you.

It's.. a pretty illuminating experiment.

[Telecaster]

To be fair, cameras don't really "botch up" color creation...they just do it differently than our eye/brain system. The data coming from a sensor isn't the same as the data coming from our eyes, and the image processor between our ears is in a whole other league compared to anything we've yet been able to create in silicon & software. Also when we look at a photo we're seeing a second-generation image, an interpretation of an interpretation. IMO it's kind of amazing that photos work as well as they do.

-Dave-