Perception of Sight

Contained here are my thoughts on how we as humans see and interpret color. These will not go into anything about the human eye or anything like that. Instead it is meant to make you realize that the objects you see are not really what you see. With that said, allow me to tweak your brain.

Let us define a color as it is used here: "A color is one part of the visible light spectrum in light." Now, why do we see color? The eye of course! But why does the eye see color instead of constant blackness? Well, we know from our definition that pure light contains colors, in fact all the colors. If this is so, why don't we constantly see white? Because objects absorb certain colors out of the spectrum, thus now giving the light a limited spectrum.

Ok, so what am I trying to say here? Light starts with all the color spectrums. It hits an object which absorbs some (or all) of those, thus changing the "appearance" of the light. Now, look at a pad of paper. What color is it? If you answer answered blue, red, yellow, green, or any other color, you're wrong (unless you're accurately predicting my point).

Say we have a blue that most people would call blue. Pure light (light containing every color) hits that ball, and the ball absorbs every color but blue and reflects the rest. Since the ball absorbed every color except the blue spectrum, the ball would actually be orange, the color opposite blue (orange contains all colors except blue). This means that the color we see coming off of the ball is blue while the ball itself is orange.

This is the same with any other colored object. Say you're holding a ripe banana, its yellow right? Wrong. The light coming off of the banana is yellow, but the banana itself is dark blue. Once again, pure light is hitting the banana which absorbs the blue spectrum off the light. The remaining spectrums are reflected off to our eyes.

Another question, what color are these words? Lets see, they appear red, so they'd be the negative of red, which is cyan right? Wrong again. Since those words are comming from your moniter, they are the true red spectrum, and thus are red. Actually this is incorrect as well, there are not really any words here, just a bunch of colored pixels which your mind interprets as words, unlike pen-written words, they don't really exist.

Now, since a moniter displays the real color, look at any picture on your computer. Is this a true representation of that object? It looks like it does in real life, so it would be accurate right? Nope, the picture displayed is using the actual color spectrum that the eye sees, the real object is the opposite of that color. Thus the computer's picture looks correct but it is really a double-negative of the actual object.

Take our so-called "blue" ball that's really orange again. When pure light hits the ball it absorbs the orange spectrum and reflects the blue. A camera picks up the blue light and saves that informatio, which is a negative of the ball. Ever wonder why film negatives are negatives of an image? Now, the camera won't sell if it won't display the object on the computer as it looks in real life, so it has to invert the negative, creating a double-negative.

To summarize, here are my two points:

You actually see the negative of any object.
The evil computers lie to you by inverting an object's color twice.