Color Range Perception

A recent piece by design and media arts lecturer Douglas Goodwin published in The Conversation looked at how the colors we perceive on the screens of our devices differs from colors in nature.

Digital images automatically convert photons into colors suitable for the hardware on which they’ll be displayed and the software running on those devices. Most such software uses color standards that were developed for older technologies (like cathode-ray tube monitors) and thus have dramatically reduced color ranges, compared to what the human eye is capable of perceiving.

This is true of all surfaces and color replications: the nature of the medium in which a color is portrayed will determine how it looks in different lightning, how different people perceive it, and so on.

But our devices, and smartphones in particular (because they were developed with their own cameras, which heavily process the photos they take so that those photos feel more appealing) further alter natural color, converting it into (usually) the sRGB color space, then optimizing in accordance with company-specific metrics for what an ideal photo looks like.