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Originally Posted by Ut
Hrmm, since this has been brought up...
I've always wondered why they don't have some sort of white calibration reference in the photos. Through the filters, it'd look red, blue, or green. Combining the three images and adjusting until the reference was white should give you true colour, shouldn't it? Of course, if it were so simple, it'd be that simple.
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Hmmm... Well, White balance is used to calibrate digital and video cameras, but I wouldn't say it gives true color. When I see a sheet of paper, I perceive it as white, but it doesn't necessarily look pure white to me, it will have a certain color temperature, it looks orange under low power incandesants, while it looks slightly yellow under higher powers. If you were to balance the color levels so that it was perfect white, it would no longer be true color. In environments where the light has different color, it may be different. And even if you had a perfectly calibrated image, you would have to calibrate your computer too, as there are differences in different screens and video cards. I guess you would need colorimeter, densitometer, spectrophotometer or some such device... But unless you do photo developing or printing, I guess that is a bit overkill :wink:
In addition to what I mentioned in the earlier post, the eye also seems to use a relative approach to imaging, concentrating on differences, not absolute color values, so what your eyes see might not be what a color really is...