Zeinab Hashemi
2nd of August

Brain perception of colors and photo enhancement

"Over the weekend, I finished a fascinating book on the history of color science. Full Spectrum, How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, by Adam Rogers, traces the history of color research and human perception from the discoveries of the earliest pigments used for cave paintings to the latest use of structured nanoparticles to create color without pigments. A critical concept that Rogers stressed about human color perception is color constancy which allows us to recognize the color of an object even when the spectrum of light being reflected changes." David Williams wrote.

David adds that this allows us to realize that the grass is green even though the actual wavelengths captured by our eyes differ significantly from a foggy morning, a sunny afternoon, and a fading sunset. I interpret this to mean that the human brain knows what color things are supposed to be in a scene. Therefore, when a printed photo or screen image of a photo doesn't match the brain's color expectations, it loses a portion of its emotional impact. 

He is right. For example, the brain can detect over-enhancing landscape photos and unnatural saturation of the sky or trees. That is why most people find over-edited photos not so pleasant. Of course, photo editing is important but Knowing how much edit your photo needs is an essential part of photography.

Here you can see a beautiful landscape photo taken by a mobile phone, without any additional enhancement:
This is an over-edited version of the original image with unnatural and high-saturated colors. Does your brain feel something strange?

AI technology has entered this area to help photographers save time. These state-of-the-art tools are very accurate most of the time, and they can also be trusted because they edit photos like a professional photographer.

For example, Viesus, as a fully automatic photo enhancer, is designed to recognize different parts of an image and enhance them separately and moderately in a single click. For example, the algorithm brightens up the darker area of a jungle in a landscape photo without over-exposing bright parts, and it adds more contrast to the sky without making shadows darker.

It does the color correction too, but in a natural way so the brain doesn't sense anything strange or artificial. At the same time, the human eyes will be pleased by the beauty of colors and details of nature.

The original photo
The photo enhanced by Viesus

Maybe a photographer desires to dodge the highlights or burn some shadows. Adjusting the color balance of the whole or parts of the photo can also be a good idea. But the photographer has not much to do since the basic enhancements have been done fast and accurately. Therefore automatic photo enhancer is enough in general and is a plus for professionals.

You can try Viesus photo enhancer at viesus.cloud for free and see the result!