Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Display
There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world.
Moulton’s article is necessarily a bit technical, but he does a good job of explaining why colors in the real world—a butterfly’s wing, a peacock’s plumage, a tropical lagoon, a deciduous forest on a sunny summer afternoon—are so much more visually arresting than images that can be displayed on screen. Apple makes much of its display specs—the Studio Display has support for 1 billion colors with a P3 wide color gamut—but as Moulton shows, the technology involved in mixing red, green, and blue as the three primary screen colors creates a situation where some colors—most of the cyans—simply can’t be reproduced. Read it to understand why your digital photos don’t always fully capture what you saw, and savor the next time you find yourself in the presence of real-world color that no Retina display can deliver.
Color is a very complex subject, and Moulton’s explanation is very good.
Thank you Adam for sharing Moulton’s work. As a photographer, colour space used within different mediums is complex and with interesting limits. I will pay more attention to cyan now.
This is a fascinating article - it soon took me beyond what I know already. Next time I go out I will be looking at “green” traffic lights to find the beauty in their colour.
A fantastic article - thank you. Maybe this explains why, after cataract operations on both eyes, I started seeing double with green traffic lights. I am likely seeing two wavelengths of light but perceiving them both as “green”? (another explanation is reflection of green light within the artificial lenses)
On topic, maybe the next big breakthrough in digital photography (and monitors) is a departure from the sRGB standard that was developed for colour TVs decades ago.
Have you asked your ophthalmologist?
I suspect it is reflections.
FWIW, I have a scar on the cornea of one eye (childhood accident), and in a dark environment (e.g., driving at night), bright objects (like tail-lights and traffic lights) produce a double-image in that eye. The light hitting the scar splits, creating the double-image.
Fortunately, it rarely bothers me - after all these years, it’s something I normally ignore and don’t notice unless I choose to pay attention to it.
My ophthalmologist did not have an explanation.
I mentioned two wavelengths in my post because, a while ago, I read that the natural lens blocks some UV rays from reaching the retina but artificial lenses allow these rays through. So my speculation is that green LED traffic lights also emit some UV and my eyes are seeing it as green. Ryan Moulton’s article strengthens that speculation although, I agree, that reflections are more likely.
My wife had cataract operations on both her eyes and, with her lenses, she has never seen double green traffic lights in four years.
Google AI suggests that it isn’t that it is green, or a traffic light, it is that the green traffic lights are high contrast light source. You may see the same visual artifacts around other bright lights.
Do you have multifocal IOLs?
They are not multifocal. Many years ago I worked with a lighting expert who mentioned that I had exceptional colour perception. That made me think that I might “see” some radiation beyond the normal, human spectrum. All just speculation!
I have also had cataract operations on both eyes, and a few years ago I started sometimes noticing double images when I was looking at stars or the moon at night. As I understand it, the cause is that my two eyes don’t “fuse” to focus on the same point in the sky. It is most likely to happen when my eyes are tired. I am sitting at my computer now using a pair of computer reading glasses prescribed by an ophthalmologist that use add a correction called “prism” to correct the mis-focus of my eyes. She prescribed them to reduce the eyestrain I had been suffering from trying to read computer screens. Here’s a link that explains more. https://www.aao.org/eye-health/glasses-contacts/what-is-prism-correction-in-eyeglasses
It is actually common. Years ago in college, I had a Physics lab on light where a “white-light” source (I wish I could remember the actual source) was projected through a prism onto a white panel in a dark room. Of course, everyone saw “the rainbow.” What surprised us was that several folks saw 2, 3 or more rainbows on both sides of the “quote” visible spectrum. I saw one-and-half into IR and two-and-half into UV. I’ve always wondered if that extra-sensitivity contributed to my interest in visual arts.
The first sign I remember of having cataracts came when I was riding with my wife and sister and they could see violet light from something outside but I could not see the violet. Exposure to violet and ultraviolet light darkens the material in the eye and you can’t see the violet end of the spectrum. Once I had the cataracts removed I could see the blue light much better. It was winter, and when I saw the first snowfall after the cataract was removed, the fresh snow looked bluish.