Can a camera lens make a scene look brighter than viewing it with the naked eye?
Asked 2/28/2013
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Ignoring viewfinder limitations, can any lens/aperture make a scene appear brighter than it does to your eye, as if the lens were funneling light or acting like a magnifying glass? I understand the difference between f-stops and T-stops, and I’m not asking whether f/1.0 is somehow magical. I’m asking whether, purely optically and without active amplification, a lens can create an image with greater brightness/luminance than the original scene or than direct human vision.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
13y ago
2 Answers
5
Well, sort of. Think about the sun shining through a lens — it's immediately apparent that the focused spot of light is brighter than the unfocused.
However, the catch is that your "real view" also goes through a lens which focuses the light: your eye. So, in a sense, the real comparison is simply "Is there a lens which is brighter than the human eye?" — and the human eye's aperture is somewhere on the slower edge of fast lenses. No matter how you measure, it's certainly slower than a f/1.4 lens.
But, I think party what you're asking is if a lens can effectively act as an all-optical night-vision device. The catch is that the eye isn't much slower than that f/1.4 lens... probably not much more than 2 stops. That means that the fastest lens possible doesn't really gain that much.
Overall, at least in the context of photography, I think this turns out to be less exciting than it might seem at first. That's because the effect of a an aperture faster than the human eye is only part of the overall equation. We can also make sensors that have higher gain than even the night-adjusted human eye, but most crucially, we can use long exposure to integrate over a much longer time than our own vision does in low light. So, overall, it's really, really easy to produce an image which has an exposure much higher than the scene appears naturally.
Originally by user1943. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1943
13y ago
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For an extended scene, no: a passive lens cannot make the image itself brighter than the scene’s own luminance. It can gather light over a larger area and concentrate it, but that does not increase luminance of the formed image; otherwise it would violate basic optical limits (often described via conservation of etendue). Losses in real lenses actually make them slightly dimmer, not brighter.
What can change is your comparison point:
- A lens can focus light into a smaller spot, making that spot intense.
- Your eye is also a lens system, so the fair comparison is a camera lens versus the eye.
- Very fast lenses can be “faster” than the eye by some amount, so the view through such a lens may seem somewhat brighter than naked-eye viewing, but not dramatically so, and not because the lens creates extra light.
So a passive lens is not an all-optical night-vision device. It can improve how much light is collected and delivered relative to your eye, especially for point sources or depending on pupil/aperture differences, but it does not increase the scene’s intrinsic brightness.
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