[Leica] B&W vs. color

[Peter Klein]

Larry:  You'll notice that the article is a business-oriented article, and
its main point is that choosing the right colors for your
product packaging (and doing it better than the competition) is going to
mean that you get more impulse buys. Which they then stretch to the
unsupported conclusions that businesspeople then draw about their
employees' creativity.  Fine and dandy. We have known for years that color
is a powerful psychological stimulus and a powerful advertising tool.  But
color can also be a distraction, taking your attention away from the subtle
content and towards the more obvious. (This ties in well with Ted's
quotable quote about photographing clothes vs. souls).  So if you want to
see the pretty sunset, photograph color.  If you want to see the truth,
photograph B&W.

I don't completely believe that, I'm just pulling your chain.   :-)  B&W is
also a different aesthetic, and I think appreciation for it is to some
degree generational.  But I still love it, darn it.  And I'm encouraged by
some younger photographers' "discovery" of B&W.  :-)

Now the video is a very deceptive marketing ploy.  Most color-blind people
are color blind because they lack one or more of the pigments that allow
the cones to "fire" in response to certain bands of the spectrum. When the
brain puts together the neural firings from these pigments, a color-blind
person lacks one or more channels of information with which to generate the
perception of color. It's similar (in principle) to a CRT computer screen
where one of the three color "guns" has gone bad. A color-blind person sees
as alike colors where the pigment(s) they lack makes a significant
difference between one color and another.  So, for instance, red and green
can look the same, as a kind of brownish orange.

The glasses shown in the video probably have different colored filters for
each eye, and/or they cut out the "ambiguous" parts of the spectrum, which
will allow the brain to perceive a difference between the colors that
normally look alike to the color-blind person--e.g. red and green. Perhaps
a tint difference, perhaps a brightness difference. This may help in
distinguishing traffic lights, for example. It may be an improvement, and
it may even be an aesthetic improvement. But it's not as if they are
suddenly "cured." The sunset they see with the glasses may be prettier than
before, and it may even be a revelation to them, but it is not as if they
suddenly can see the true colors as a person with normal color vision does.
Which is what the video cleverly implies. That's snake oil.

<http://mashable.com/2015/03/23/glasses-solve-color-blindness/>.

--Peter

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 6:46 AM, Larry Zeitlin via LUG <lug at leica-users.org>
wrote:

>  Before you shoot your next B&W film look at this video.
>
> http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/new-video-reminds-us-how-great-colors-are
> Larry Z
>
>
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