What color is this dress?

[Happy Monkey]

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

Exactly.

Josef Albers did ground breaking work on color and perception. One of the hardest things to teach photo students is the concept of a light meter. They have a hard time understanding that their experience of a scene's illumination is subjective but the meter is objective, ie, it doesn't know if something is black or white, it just knows how much light is being reflected. Now add colored ligth to the equation and the surface's color and you get a big old mess.

For instance, if you look at a burgundy colored shirt under typical fluorescent lighting it will look brown because the light hitting the shirt if high in green light and deficient in magenta. Without magenta light hitting the objecgt it can't reflect magenta light and so looks brown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers

very interesting page on color theory

http://www.jaimetreadwell.com/Color-...ge-lecture.htm