Color in Context

Lecture twenty of the "Great Courses" _Philosophy of Mind_ begins, "Is color an objective feature of the world or something that exists only in subjective experience?"

Roughly, the conclusion is that experience of color is in the mind, but there are objective things in the world that bring about that experience.

"Two central facts show that color perception is more than wavelengths.
1. Color constancy is the fact that colors are perceived to be the same despite changes in wavelength.
2. Color contrast is the fact that colors depend on contrast in context...."

Almost everything of our color experience is 'in context'. Part of it is wavelengths. Things reflect the colors of things around them. Nothing demonstrates this so well as these two photos I took at the Brooklyn Museum:


Old Kingdom Gneiss Statue, Fertility Figurine

Compare my photos to those taken by the museum people:

The objects look different in their photos because they have chosen a neutral background that would not add its color by reflection. I tried to tone down the reflective color in mine, in the gneiss statue, by desaturating it a bit, and in the fertility figurine, by adjusting the color balance towards the cyan and blue to cancel out some of the orange:
Color Balance
Color Levels: -10, 0, +10
Cyan     ----------||-------------- Red
Magenta ------------||------------ Green
Yellow   --------------||---------- Blue
(Unable to take a screen capture of the control, I've tried to relate its workings thusly)

As you can see, my adjustments make it 'truer' to the native coloring:

Photo at far right is raw from the camera, without editing.


Photo at far right is raw from the camera, without editing.

Yet I am not trying to get rid of all of the reflected color. I want to convey my experience of these items, as they were in that environment. The neutral background photos may be more 'scientifically' correct, yet my photos look more poetically correct. Curators and museum installation people need to be aware of this effect, in order to enhance our experience.

That is normal 'context based' color experience, for everything around us is absorbing reflective color from nearby objects. For instance, you've heard of the eyes that look blue or green, depending on what the person is wearing. But the context can go beyond the normal, to become strange and illusionary. I learned from the _Philosophy of Mind_ course of an intriguing website featuring all sorts of illusions. The following illusion had me boggled. I did not believe the color of the axis point link was the same, nor the angles all ninety degrees:


This is from a screen capture... (Actually, a screen capture of a screen capture)
...as is this 'mask revealed'.

I didn't believe them. Those two center links couldn't be the same color. So with that screen capture sitting in Photoshop, I took the color dipper and tapped each of them. The device to the right shows the Photoshop tool, with the dipped results.... THE SAME!

Even though I 'know' they're both gray, one still looks blue and one still looks yellow.