Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 396898" data-attributes="member: 5990"><p>It's because what your brain maps is the contrast, not the absolute intensity (or even the absolute spectral intensities, the true color - you really perceive a sort of relative color).&nbsp; The range of optical intensities encountered in the real world is so immense that even images with logarithmic absolute response would require processing unwieldy amounts of information.&nbsp; Thus the brain doesn't bother paying much attention to absolute intensity values and works with contrast levels instead.&nbsp; The really sophisticated bit is that our optical perception is capable of seamlessly integrating varying intensity reference levels within in the same scene to produce an apparently continuous and uniterrupted map of the contrast.&nbsp; This is one reason why you can perceive a scene with mixed light and shadow quite easily, while if you take a photograph of the same scene, you either have to settle for having the bright parts of the scene washed out or the shadowed parts completely black.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="tarchon, post: 396898, member: 5990"] It's because what your brain maps is the contrast, not the absolute intensity (or even the absolute spectral intensities, the true color - you really perceive a sort of relative color). The range of optical intensities encountered in the real world is so immense that even images with logarithmic absolute response would require processing unwieldy amounts of information. Thus the brain doesn't bother paying much attention to absolute intensity values and works with contrast levels instead. The really sophisticated bit is that our optical perception is capable of seamlessly integrating varying intensity reference levels within in the same scene to produce an apparently continuous and uniterrupted map of the contrast. This is one reason why you can perceive a scene with mixed light and shadow quite easily, while if you take a photograph of the same scene, you either have to settle for having the bright parts of the scene washed out or the shadowed parts completely black. [/QUOTE]

Verification