Chuck, You brought up aliens ;) If cameras did not do an excellent job of reproducing what the "general population" sees, they wouldn't be selling any of them. Your also not correct about "having" to shoot in raw format. You can easily set the the white balance of the camera, shoot a shot of M42 in low resolution JPG mode, and end up with a very nice image that will look very similar to one you would have to tweak out in raw format. The simple compression scripts in the camera *that are designed to create the color pallet our brain sees* work well with no processing. The reason you shoot in raw is to gain more data, and control over that data, and to remove false readout signals such as noise. I think my point still stands. Cameras are designed to create the colors the general population sees, and thus, they capture the same set of colors from space, which would be the colors we would see if our eyes were bigger, and capable of long exposure. ;) I don't know if you have ever seen color in M42 with your eye before, I have. I can also make out the blues and reds in the trifid nebula after a minute or two. The colors the camera are capturing are accurate relative to the general human population. At least as far as consumer grade DSLR's and Point and Shoots go. Chuck Hards wrote:
You don't have to invoke aliens as perceiving colors differently, there are plenty of humans who do it, just not in great numbers compared to the general population. And many terrestrial animals and insects "see" well outside of our visual window. Undoubtedly "colors" correspond to energy levels differently for them, than they do for us.
You wrote "As good as the camera". Let me try and understand what that means. I'm going get picky here so forgive me, David.
That is true if you ignore the fact that the camera (computer, actually, or film emulsion in the old days) builds image intensity over time. In real-time, it is not much better than the eye in the visible part of the spectrum.
The tint and saturation of a particular image is rarely aesthetically pleasing in raw format straight from the camera, apparently, so we need to "re-balance" those attributes with image processing software.
We spend as much or more time manipulating the image after the file (or files) have been acquired and stored. The (astronomical) camera does none of this, it's all done by either a photo technician at the enlarger, or the computer operator if it's a digital image. The individual is then more artist than documentarian, just by nature of the activity itself.
So I stand by my statement that color is still all in the mind, and has no intrinsic qualities at all. "Correct" color is subjective and not objective. Like beauty, it is strictly in the eye of the beholder.
On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 2:23 PM, David Rankin <David@rankinstudio.com> wrote:
Thus, if our eye was as good as a camera, the galaxy would look just like the photo.
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