Optical illusion: seeing colour in a black-and-white photo
Saturday 24 October 2020, 18:36 by Elvira Smit | 6,138 views | 0 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
White is rarely truly white. That is because the ambient light often contains a colour. You barely notice it in real life, but in photos the effect can sometimes be very distracting. Fortunately, you can correct the white balance.
Your eyes do something very similar, although it is called chromatic adaptation. It makes you experience white as white every time. And you can use it to create an amusing optical illusion.
Changing colours
Look around you and find something white. Is it really white, or, on closer inspection, does the light falling on it contain some colour? All day long, our eyes correct the colours around us.
My blue jumper has a different colour under fluorescent light, in the sun or in the evening twilight. But to me, it remains the same shade of blue. So we actually have a built-in white balance correction.
That is useful.
And, as with most corrections, you can turn it into a fun optical illusion. Because in some cases you correct 'incorrectly' and start seeing strange things.
Take a look at the image below, for example. Start looking as soon as you see a coloured image, and focus intently on the dot in the centre. Keep doing this until you suddenly see a different coloured image.
As soon as you move your eyes, however, you see that the second photo is just a black-and-white photo. The video below explains the illusion in more detail. It teaches you how you see colours, and how the colour wheel is put together again.
About the author
Ik heb een eigen fotografieblog, Kronkeling. Daar schrijf ik om de week twee artikelen. Over hoe je je blik kunt scherpen, je creativiteit kunt aanwakkeren, en over fotografen die mij inspireren. Geen technische zaken, wél over hoe je leert kijken. En dat blijkt nog een hele klus. Een mooi startpunt zijn de Kronkeltips, die vind je hier.
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Would you like to take better photos and keep up with what is happening in photography? Photofacts publishes articles that teach you something about photography — from a product announcement to a practical shooting tip or a look at a website. Photofacts covers photography every day and is a hobby project of Elja Trum's that got out of hand. The articles are written by a team of volunteer authors. If you would enjoy writing one or more articles for Photofacts, do get in touch.More about PhotofactsPhotofacts is made possible in part by
