One can play fast and loose with the auto-white balance, otherwise part
of the Retinex theory of color vision--can lead to some oddball results
like
Goethe shadows. Take 2 projectors one with white light and the other
of equal intensity with pink light and place a small statue in front of
the pink light. What color is the shadow? Well the shadow is on a
neutral background and illuminated by white light so it is grey, no?
Wrong!!
With a pinkish illuminant , our brain perceives a decrease in the red
component so it must be a green object and the shadow will appear so.
Gives me a headache thinking about it, so I will quit.
Mike
This discussion of the human eye and visual processing reminded me of
some
research I read a few years ago. According to the research, babies are
not
born with the ability to "auto white-balance" the scene before them.
This
may explain why some babies don't handle florescent lighting well
because
their world is a sickly green. I don't recall how long it took for the
visual processing system to determine white-balance, but evidently
until a
point-of-reference is determined, the eye sees the real colors in front
of
it, not the corrected version.
AG
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