This is interesting—it's called the Grid illusion. A color grid is laid over a black-and-white image and, for most of us anyway, our minds fill in solid colors to an impressive degree. Here's the picture on the TYWKIWDBI blog. The red grid over the faces doesn't really work for me, but it's difficult to believe that the yellow, green and blue T-shirts only have color grids laid over them, and that our brains do the rest.
Here's the picture with the grid lines blocked out.
That's how hand-coloring works. A long-ago girlfriend who worked for The Washington Post and did graphics for local television stations was known for her hand-colored B&W photos, and I was always amazed how little detail or precision her colors could have and still work. (She sometimes used colored pencils on matte photo paper and sometimes Marshall's Oils, once a standard for that sort of work and still available from places like dickblick.com.) She was sanguine about colors bleeding over into the wrong areas (or not coloring all of an area), breezily saying things like "it'll look fine." And it did, she was right. I think she knew intuitively how little added color could suggest solid colors to viewers' eye/brains.
The look was that of old colorized postcards, which can have a sort of charm. Of course the colors didn't necessarily have to have much relation to the real colors of the scene, which also bothered me; you could photograph an orange sweater, print it as B&W, and hand-color it green with no one the wiser.
The legend on the grid illusion photo leads us back to some posts by Øyvind Kolås who calls it a "color assimilation grid." His comment: "luminance is a lot more important than the chroma for our visual perception." True, that.
I've guessed in the past that this might be one reason I like B&W more than color...because for some reason my brain is more sensitive to luminance and less to chroma than the way most people perceive things. I know that when I was very young I used to have an innate sense that colors "got in the way" of seeing...no idea how much that might have been due to suggestion or conditioning, but I recall the feeling. When we first got a color TV I was uncomfortable looking at it, and much later I bought one of the last B&W TVs you could buy. In art class and with coloring books I would complain that I never knew what colors to make things (I remember saying to my first grade teacher, when faced with a blank coloring-book page, "but what color is that?"), and I would sometimes complain that there were "only a few" colors...as if all oranges were the same and all blues the same, etc.
And on the other hand I've learned that some other people have a much more visceral, immediate, or emotional connection and response to colors than I do. A clue for me was that Szarkowski disliked Outerbridge because he couldn't stand his colors. In high school art class my bête noire (although we were friendly) was a girl who would churn out paintings at high speed, foregoing detail and edges. Very broad-brush—literally. Her work disturbed me. In retrospect I think she was very sensitive to chroma and what she was doing was putting colors together, because that's what was important to her and it was how her brain saw. And I just didn't get it at the time. It's what Rothko does, only he foregoes all figuration and she hadn't gotten that far. My pencil and pen-and-ink drawings were the opposite: detailed and precise, but monochrome.
(I do have a strong sense of color harmony. I tend to prefer color photographers who actually actively use color as a primary creative element in their photographs, rather than those who simply photograph in color and don't seem to pay any attention to what the colors are. I should expand on that sometime...but some other time.)
I suspect we each have our individual relationships to color, perhaps even to chroma v. luminance. It's worth interrogating yourself about, anyway.
Mike
(Thanks to Stan B. for the first link, and it's not his blog.)
Book of Interest:
Photographs Not Taken: a collection of photographers' essays, edited by Will Steacy (Daylight Books; Second Revised ed. edition, 2012). Recommended by Mike Chisholm, who has good taste. This is a link to Amazon from TOP.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Albert Smith: "Many people are enthralled with the monochrome-only Leica cameras, and on various Fujifilm sites the wish for that brand to put out a similar B&W model usually comes in near the top when people discuss what Fujifilm should do next. I watch YouTube videos from street photographer Alan Schaller who is a master of black and white shooting. His advice video, '7 tips for black & white street photography with Alan Schaller,' says that you should go 100% mono, you can't get good switching to color at will. So this philosophy would add validity to the mono-only cameras. But try as I might, stalking the streets with my Fuji set to Acros, I'm always seeing color even when my EVF is showing black and white. A bright red car parked in front of a blue wall forces me to switch over to color, I can't just accept grey on another shade of grey. I don't think I'd be able to go out with a mono Fuji if they made one. And I was happy when I could afford my first color TV."
Mike replies: Ctein and I disagree about this, but I agree with you and Alan Schaller. I see how the camera sees. So if the camera sees color, pretending it doesn't doesn't work for me. But I had no problem at all shooting B&W exclusively for two decades. Ctein claims it doesn't matter to him, that he can shoot either one at will—at which point in such discussions, I usually remind him that he's not a B&W photographer.
Bob Keefer: "I've made hand-colored black and white photos for more than 20 years. In the beginning, I carefully colored within the lines, sweating every fluttering leaf in a landscape. But I soon realized those photos looked less compelling than the looser ones, usually on throw-away prints, that I did while experimenting with various color combinations. Soon my work became more painterly—and much more convincing. As the photo on the TYWKIWDBI site shows, our eyes do a great job of matching hues with natural boundaries."
Geoff Wittig: "There's a well-known saying in the world of representational painting: value does all the work, and color gets all the credit. Value is the light to dark scale, or black and white. Viewers (and buyers of paintings) often respond emotionally to a painter's color palette, but it's the light to dark value structure that determines how a painting 'reads' from a distance, and that draws a viewer in for a closer look. Emotional mood, sense of atmosphere, the illusion of distance and deep space in a painting? All are largely determined by value, not color. In fact, within surprisingly broad limits, a wide range of color choices will work just fine to create a realistic-looking painting, if the value structure is correct. The one property of color that is important for paintings to read as authentic is color temperature, meaning warm to cool, roughly from the red/orange warm end to the icy cold cobalt blue end of the visual spectrum. This will be immediately familiar to photographers used to employing warming filters for pleasing portraits, or photographing a landscape in the warm light of a setting sun."
Not THAT Ross Cameron: "The way the human brain works in fascinating. Just look up the homunculus fallacy.
"I can recommend Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone. B&W and Chroma vision are processed through different parts of the brain. B&W vision / outlines / edges etc. came first, and chroma is a later evolutionary adaption for animals that are active during the day—I think for identifying plants etc to eat or avoid. Night vision has little to no need for colour.
"She outlines many visual effects that trip the differences in processing—including that colour does not need to fill the boundaries. She explains the science known at time of publishing, and notes her speculations as such too. Thanks to Geoff for his comment, eye-opener to me (boom boom), noting value is discussed extensively in this book. But the way Geoff framed the point is very illuminating (sorry, on a roll).
"I'm on my second attempt to read the book. It's not a light read. By the end of a day's work from home, my mind is usually numb / mush. I need something lighter to 'distract' my mind and give it a chance to defrag from work, before tackling something else of substance. I no longer have the commute home, during which time I would usually peruse my favoured photography sites and the news—not that I'm saying TOP is lightweight. ;~)
"I'll stop there before I dig myself in any deeper."
Mike replies: No offense taken. TOP is not lightweight enough. I'd get more readers if it were more so.
Will: "The Gird Isiollun msot rmednis me of the wlel konwn fcat taht msot rdaeres hvae no dltfifiucy raindeg a ppgararah of txet wtih asbrud sllepnig as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltreets are crerctloy paelced. The brain is a fascinating machine indeed!"