Color In Photography

The purpose of this presentation is to explore the perception of color as related to photography. There are many studies on the way that race, gender, age, environment, and society can alter the way in which people perceive colors in our world. However, few have studied this concept related to photographs. Color is an illusion, a trick based entirely on the way in which light encounters and enters into one’s eyes. Therefore, color is not an actual “truth”, lighting is the “truth” behind color. However, we classify our world into color categories because, though it is not “real” it is real to our eyes and it helps us survive. Our color perception can be affected by many things, but we have evolved to the point where our eyes can interpret colors, …show more content…
Color perception in photographs, however, can be more noticeably different because our perception is based on more than just our personal experiences and biology, it is also affected by the photographic elements that our eyes have not yet evolved to cope with and that we can not control.
Our perceptions of color in photographs are affected by the same factors as our perception of color in the real world. Our feelings can alter how we perceive color and meaning in a photograph. If we are feeling powerful or happy, a photo of sunflowers can appear to be brighter and more exciting. However, if we are feeling sad or weak, our minds may perceive the colors to be more gloomy or shadowed. The development of language also affects the way in which we perceive color. Once we start categorizing colors into groups based on similarities or …show more content…
Once we start perceiving objects differently in the real world, we relate that image we have made in our mind to the image we are seeing in a photo. Our minds image will alter the color in the photograph we are looking at because our mind begins to perceive the world using the “top-down processing” model, which means we see what we are expecting to see based on what we have already seen. Through evolution, our brains have developed the ability known as color constancy, which is the ability to keep a color or image constant despite new elements or a change in shadows. In the ‘frozen’ which are photographs, however, our mind is not able to make these same adjustments because we have no concept of the before or after the photo. Therefore, we must make these judgments on our own and this can cause a variety of variations in color perception from person to person. Additionally, our color perceptions in the “real world” have evolved based on the natural