Seeing Color: How Our Brain Tricks Us and Cameras Try to Keep Up
TO RICHARD
Before we can discuss the illusions created by Samsung cameras or any camera for that matter, it’s best to start at the beginning: our brain does not see exactly what our eyes see. Vision is sometimes reality, and sometimes a created image—our perception is always a mix of raw input and brain interpretation.
Our perception of color is not a direct readout of the world—it’s a reconstruction built by the brain. Light reflects off objects with different wavelengths, but the exact mix of wavelengths hitting our eyes depends heavily on the lighting. A red apple under bright noon sunlight looks different than the same apple in the golden glow of sunset. Yet, remarkably, we still perceive it as red. This is because our brain constantly compensates for lighting conditions. It applies unconscious “corrections” so that familiar objects maintain a consistent color in our mind. In a sense, our brain is lying to us, making the world appear stable and predictable.
Most people experience this trickery in twilight. As light dims, colors slowly lose brightness, but the brain continues to interpret them as nearly the same as in daylight: leaves still appear green, flowers still red, just slightly muted. In the woods, for example, everything seems to maintain its normal hues even as the sun sets. But when the light finally drops below a threshold—say, a sudden flick of a light switch—the brain can no longer maintain the illusion. Suddenly, everything goes gray. In reality, the world had been gradually losing color the entire time, but our brain’s color constancy masked the change. The shift feels dramatic because the illusion abruptly collapses, revealing the true, muted tones of low light.
Cameras try to mimic this process using white balance. The sensor itself is literal—it just records light without knowing that sunlight is yellowish or that indoor bulbs are orange. White balance algorithms adjust the colors so that neutral objects look neutral and familiar colors appear “correct” to the human eye. In doing so, the camera is deliberately distorting reality to match the brain’s distortions. The apple captured under sunset light might be digitally warmed or cooled so it still looks “red” in the final image, even though the raw sensor data would show a red shifted toward orange.
In both cases, human vision and camera processing are not objective—they are interpretive. Our brain tricks us into seeing consistent colors across different lights, and cameras lie in the opposite direction: they tweak the captured image to match the brain’s expectations. What we perceive as “accurate color” is really a shared illusion created by biology and technology.
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