The intricate relationship between the eyes and the brain, often termed the eye-mind connection, reveals that vision is predominantly a cognitive process. This understanding has profound implications for fields such as design, where capturing and maintaining attention is paramount. This essay delves into the nuances of visual perception, the brain’s role in interpreting visual data, and how this knowledge can be applied to effective design strategies.
This cognitive aspect of vision is evident in phenomena such as optical illusions, where the brain interprets visual information in a way that contradicts physical reality. These illusions underscore that what we “see” is not merely a direct recording of the external world but a constructed experience shaped by cognitive processes.
Understanding the cognitive nature of vision is crucial for effective design. Designers must consider how the brain processes visual information to create compelling and engaging visuals. This involves several key principles:
To measure the contrast ratio you will need a light meter. The process starts with you measuring the main source of light, or the key light.
Get a reading from the brightest area on the face of your subject. Then, measure the area lit by the secondary light, or fill light. To make sense of what you have just measured you have to understand that the information you have just gathered is in F-stops, a measure of light. With each additional F-stop, for example going one stop from f/1.4 to f/2.0, you create a doubling of light. The reverse is also true; moving one stop from f/8.0 to f/5.6 results in a halving of the light.
It lets you load any .cube LUT right in your browser, see the RGB curves, and use a split view on the Granger Test Image to compare the original vs. LUT-applied version in real time — perfect for spotting hue shifts, saturation changes, and contrast tweaks.
In video terms gamut is normally related to as the full range of colours and brightness that can be either captured or displayed.
Generally speaking all color gamuts recommendations are trying to define a reasonable level of color representation based on available technology and hardware. REC-601 represents the old TVs. REC-709 is currently the most distributed solution. P3 is mainly available in movie theaters and is now being adopted in some of the best new 4K HDR TVs. Rec2020 (a wider space than P3 that improves on visibke color representation) and ACES (the full coverage of visible color) are other common standards which see major hardware development these days.
To compare and visualize different solution (across video and printing solutions), most developers use the CIE color model chart as a reference.
The CIE color model is a color space model created by the International Commission on Illumination known as the Commission Internationale de l’Elcairage (CIE) in 1931. It is also known as the CIE XYZ color space or the CIE 1931 XYZ color space.
This chart represents the first defined quantitative link between distributions of wavelengths in the electromagnetic visible spectrum, and physiologically perceived colors in human color vision. Or basically, the range of color a typical human eye can perceive through visible light.
Note that while the human perception is quite wide, and generally speaking biased towards greens (we are apes after all), the amount of colors available through nature, generated through light reflection, tend to be a much smaller section. This is defined by the Pointer’s Chart.
In short. Color gamut is a representation of color coverage, used to describe data stored in images against available hardware and viewer technologies.
The CIE 1931 standard has been replaced by a CIE 1976 standard. Below we can see the significance of this.
People have observed that the biggest issue with CIE 1931 is the lack of uniformity with chromaticity, the three dimension color space in rectangular coordinates is not visually uniformed.
The CIE 1976 (also called CIELUV) was created by the CIE in 1976. It was put forward in an attempt to provide a more uniform color spacing than CIE 1931 for colors at approximately the same luminance
The CIE 1976 standard colour space is more linear and variations in perceived colour between different people has also been reduced. The disproportionately large green-turquoise area in CIE 1931, which cannot be generated with existing computer screens, has been reduced.
If we move from CIE 1931 to the CIE 1976 standard colour space we can see that the improvements made in the gamut for the “new” iPad screen (as compared to the “old” iPad 2) are more evident in the CIE 1976 colour space than in the CIE 1931 colour space, particularly in the blues from aqua to deep blue.
Despite its age, CIE 1931, named for the year of its adoption, remains a well-worn and familiar shorthand throughout the display industry. CIE 1931 is the primary language of customers. When a customer says that their current display “can do 72% of NTSC,” they implicitly mean 72% of NTSC 1953 color gamut as mapped against CIE 1931.
The dynamic range is a ratio between the maximum and minimum values of a physical measurement. Its definition depends on what the dynamic range refers to.
For a scene: Dynamic range is the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene.
For a camera: Dynamic range is the ratio of saturation to noise. More specifically, the ratio of the intensity that just saturates the camera to the intensity that just lifts the camera response one standard deviation above camera noise.
For a display: Dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities emitted from the screen.
The Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high — ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Therefore, an HDR image is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values, e.g. floating-point values stored with 32 bits per color channel. Another characteristics of an HDR image is that it stores linear values. This means that the value of a pixel from an HDR image is proportional to the amount of light measured by the camera.
For TVs HDR is great, but it’s not the only new TV feature worth discussing.
The human eye perceives half scene brightness not as the linear 50% of the present energy (linear nature values) but as 18% of the overall brightness. We are biased to perceive more information in the dark and contrast areas. A Macbeth chart helps with calibrating back into a photographic capture into this “human perspective” of the world.
In photography, painting, and other visual arts, middle gray or middle grey is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale in photography and printing, it is typically defined as 18% reflectance in visible light
Light meters, cameras, and pictures are often calibrated using an 18% gray card[4][5][6] or a color reference card such as a ColorChecker. On the assumption that 18% is similar to the average reflectance of a scene, a grey card can be used to estimate the required exposure of the film.
The trigger phrase is “equirectangular 360 degree panorama”. I would avoid saying “spherical projection” since that tends to result in non-equirectangular spherical images.
Image resolution should always be a 2:1 aspect ratio. 1024 x 512 or 1408 x 704 work quite well and were used in the training data. 2048 x 1024 also works.
I suggest using a weight of 0.5 – 1.5. If you are having issues with the image generating too flat instead of having the necessary spherical distortion, try increasing the weight above 1, though this could negatively impact small details of the image. For Flux guidance, I recommend a value of about 2.5 for realistic scenes.
Artificial light sources, not unlike the diverse phases of natural light, vary considerably in their properties. As a result, some lamps render an object’s color better than others do.
The most important criterion for assessing the color-rendering ability of any lamp is its spectral power distribution curve.
Natural daylight varies too much in strength and spectral composition to be taken seriously as a lighting standard for grading and dealing colored stones. For anything to be a standard, it must be constant in its properties, which natural light is not.
For dealers in particular to make the transition from natural light to an artificial light source, that source must offer:
1- A degree of illuminance at least as strong as the common phases of natural daylight.
2- Spectral properties identical or comparable to a phase of natural daylight.
A source combining these two things makes gems appear much the same as when viewed under a given phase of natural light. From the viewpoint of many dealers, this corresponds to a naturalappearance.
The 6000° Kelvin xenon short-arc lamp appears closest to meeting the criteria for a standard light source. Besides the strong illuminance this lamp affords, its spectrum is very similar to CIE standard illuminants of similar color temperature.
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