Color is a funny thing in Real Life. Light perception in a human is the reflection of ambient light off of the object we are looking at. This light we see is “based” on the source light, the Sun, the light in your room, a flashlight, the Moon, etc. Now, here’s where the interesting thing comes in. All of these light sources have a different light spectrum or color temperature.

I do photography in Real Life, and I take care to get my colors right. This is not an easy task. One key it to calibrate your monitor. All displays will have slight color variations. That Adobe Gamma program some of you see, is worthless, by the way…. You do this with a colorimeter, which is kind of a video camera you temporarily attach to the monitor that the computer can read back and see what color is really on the display.

When I take a picture with my digital SLR, the camera tries to guess what the ambient color temperature currently is when the shot is taken. It stores that information in the picture for later processing. I take pictures in what is known as a RAW image format, which is a lossless compress sensor dump. It’s not even really a picture at that point. It has to be made into a picture on a computer. This is another interesting point. Digital cameras do not take color pictures. Each photocell sees only intensities of grey, but color filters are put in front of cells for red, blue and green and then these combinations of colors are mixed together to make a color pictures. Oddly, there are more green photocells than the other colors, because human eyes are more sensitive to shades of green (probably to see ripe fruits).

Now here’s where it gets strange. When I “develop” the digital RAW image at home, I decide what color is what. I start with the suggestion of the color temperature from what the camera thought it was when the picture was taken, but then I can adjust it from there. Usually I calibrate from a grey color - looking for it in the shot. Select it and set that as my baseline color. And all is well. Printers need to do the same thing to get the colors corrected as well.

Now here’s where it gets really weird. This complicated process of getting the colors “right” is being done by your brain in real-time - all the time. Your brain knows what color things should be and automatically color corrects - instantly. A blue shirt outside in the Sun is not truly the same color under fluorescent lights inside. But, your eyes and brain see it as the same color. Just like magic. Your brain is a very powerful image processor, but you can fool it, for example, under a black light, things look all wrong because your eyes and brain are not used to seeing things under that color spectrum and have no point of reference to work with.

What does this have to do with Second Life? The new WindLight add on for the new skies is changing the lighting in world. People can change the lighting themselves and they change the colors of pretty much everything. Your brain is not compensating for this because it is probably not real enough, and the Real World is in your peripheral vision - locking in your brains color correction. The Herald has a post about this problem.

The funny part is, it’s not really a problem. Life is like that. Photographers get up before dawn to get out at dawn to get landscape shots. Why? The light is different because the Sunlight must travel through more atmosphere (the angle of the Sun) and has a more golden color. All of the colors in the world look more lush and have more “pop” to them. This does not last long. About an hour at most.

Photographers do not like taking shots around noon, because the light can be harsh and ugly. It is called high noon and good photographers try to avoid taking pictures then.

The bad part is, people in Second Life may not be getting a consistent view of the Second Life world because they are twittling with the settings. So everyone is seeing different things. This is fine if your tweaking colors to get a cool in world photo, but not so cool if your trying to sell a product and get a nice pastel color not look like neon. This is a sticky problem I’m not sure how they are not going to get around. Color is not a simple problem.

The previous client had a very primitive and simple color model. Now that it is getting more realistic, color is going to get complicated. I think the reason the Windlight enhanced viewer was pulled was they had not figured all this out yet. They - okay Torley - has been talking more about it recently, so I suspect they are going to be putting Windlight back into play again soon.

Should be interesting, and of course, controversial.

-Veyron