Our eyes and same sex wedding photographer are evil.
Hahaha, no, of course not, that’s just what the manufacturers of digital cameras apparently think when they compare the picture that their cameras see with the image that their own eyes give. As we already said in the article about contrast, when there are colors close in brightness nearby, our eye (in fact, the brain) tends to distance them from each other a little further than in reality … moreover, a white sheet in life is rarely the color R255, G255, B255 – even dust on it or an incorrectly selected bleach can greatly remove the color from the desired one, not to mention the lighting, although our eye, especially “at certain moments”, is able to see it as dazzling white. The situation with black looks about the same – it’s hard to say to what extent it is necessary to wash a black car, cover it with a matte polish and remove it with tricky lighting so that the color eventually comes out at zero in all channels in life. Meanwhile, our eye sees black as black, even if it is daylight, the car shines and reflects the bright sky. This feature of our eyes is called adaptability – of course, the cameras of the future will definitely shoot in this way, adjusting the dark gray color of the car to black in different situations, and the white sheet to the desired white.
Now everything is much worse: cameras shoot exactly the way they can, i.e. as it is in life, adjusted for distortions associated with the level of technology and optics used in them, and, accordingly, very far from what our eye sees – and we still don’t even blame them for obtaining a two-dimensional picture from a three-dimensional one, and for some reason, we cannot forgive the discrepancy between the picture in terms of colors and the range of the resulting brightness. It would seem, why is it so terrible if the camera takes pictures as it is in real life, because our eye will then filter everything the same way. But no, he no longer wants to take a two-dimensional image as an analogue of a three-dimensional one, and sees reality as it was at the moment the shutter was released – black “for some reason” became dark gray, white – light gray, the contrast from the image is gone.
We will find the reason for this effect in the histogram – its ends will either be empty (because what should be absolutely black has become dark gray, and the white has become dirty), or slightly filled, and this just means that white and black not in the picture, as if we ourselves do not see it. In this case, if the eyes remember how they saw reality at the time of the picture, you can try to fit the image from the camera to this picture – just open the levels in any editor and “squeeze” the edges to the zone where there are black stripes or any readings greater than zero. Thus, the grayness will go away from the photo and contrast will appear.