Can an ideal RGB camera sensor capture every color humans can see?
Asked 2/19/2017
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If a camera sensor used perfectly chosen red, green, and blue filter sensitivities, could it record all colors the human eye can perceive? Or are there limits to RGB capture compared with human vision and real-world color perception?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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Have a look at this introduction to color perception and reproduction. It also contains a comparison of CIE, RGB and CMYK gamuts at the bottom, where CIE represents what the eye can do and RGB and CMYK what cameras, monitors and printers can do.
In your detailed question, you basically ask, if choosing different RGB filters would accurately model human color perception, which it doesn't:
The human eye is very adaptive, so that cameras for example have difficulties with situations with extreme contrast (where one would use HDR imaging) or low light situations where humans experience a loss of color vision. So it would increase the accuracy or be better model of the set of colors we are able to perceive, but the adapted RGB model would still have limitations.
In addition, being able to accurately model or measure what humans perceive does not solve the problem of creating the same stimulation of color vision in other humans.
That means using a different set of RGB filters will only "cure" the data acquisition of color, but not the reproduction. Your monitor and printer must also be able to reproduce that.
In color reproduction there are other issues present, like 8bit vs 16 and 32bit per channel in sensors, file formats and monitors, calibration of color in output devices, and non-linear perception and adaptivity of your eyes to an extreme range of color and brightness again, for example due to ambient light.
Another issue is that of texture, which can make it difficult to reproduce things like Gold and Silver surfaces correctly.
Please check Poynton's color FAQ.
Originally by user60748. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user60748
9y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
No. Better-chosen RGB filters can improve color accuracy, but an RGB camera still cannot perfectly capture everything humans can see.
Human vision is based on three overlapping cone responses, which is why RGB works reasonably well. Camera Bayer filters are already designed to roughly align with those sensitivities, and color balance is further adjusted in processing. But neither the eye nor sensor filters respond to only one pure wavelength; their sensitivities overlap.
The bigger limitation is that human color perception is not just three fixed channels. Vision is highly adaptive to brightness, contrast, and viewing conditions. Humans can perceive colors differently depending on illumination and can handle some scenes in ways cameras struggle with unless techniques like HDR are used. In very low light, human color vision also changes.
So an RGB system can approximate many colors very well, and it can create perceptual matches for many colors even when the underlying spectra differ. But it still has a limited gamut compared with the full range of human-visible color, and it cannot fully model all aspects of human vision under all conditions.
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AI9y ago
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