[Tig] Instinctive contrast

[Rob Lingelbach]

On Mar 19, 2007, at 12:06 PM, Joe Owens wrote:

> aircraft are in "low-visibility" camouflage, usually framed against  
> a lovely blue sky -- beautiful if you admire these things. When  
> printed in black and white of course, the camo does its job and the  
> aircraft winks out of sight, no need to come diving out of the  
> sun-- its gone.
>
> It is disturbing how casually most black-and-white from colour is  
> achieved by simply turning down the saturation dial.  That is just  
> wrong, wrong, wrong on almost every level.

Does there exist some kind of simple optical device (a form of  
eyeglasses) that would desaturate our vision and make it
black and white?   It would be the opposite of looking at the world  
through rose-colored glasses.  But it would be really
interesting, and if I'm not mistaken, the brain might eventually  
compensate by adding in the color?  So that when the
glasses are removed after a few days the wearer now sees everything  
with double the saturation???   I'm not sure about that..
but I do know that if inverting glasses are worn, so that everything  
looks upside-down, and they are worn for a few days,
the brain of the user compensates and reverts the image to right-side- 
up.  So then she takes the glasses off, and the brain
takes another few days to compensate, which in the meantime creates a  
human with upside-down-vision, no glasses required.

The film I saw explaining this, shown in a junior-highschool science  
class, showed a POV of the guy with inverted vision
riding a motorcycle in traffic.  Impressive feat.

--
Rob Lingelbach
http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html
rob at colorist.org  rob at lingelbach.us