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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

The biggest lie in color photography is that you can accurately represent the colors of objects by simply recording the amount of red, green and blue in them. This technique - the only one in current mainstream use - gives good results only when the spectral sensitivity curves of the camera precisely match those of the human eye, and when the spectrum of the light used to make the photo is perfectly smooth, and no different kind of light will ever be used!

It's clear that the first of these requirements is hard enough to meet, and that the second one is, simply and plainly, never true.

And that's why photographers are always battling to get the right colors - and never do get them!

Not only in photography is this matter an important one. In daily life it is, too. Lots of electronic technicians hate that stupid problem of not being able to correctly read resistors. It happens that old-style resistors, and some other parts too, are labelled with color bands or dots, instead of numbers. Under some lighting conditions it can be hard to tell a red from an orange, or a green from a blue. This leads to the wrong resistors being installed in equipment, and thus more troubleshooting work.

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