Colorized pixs from the past

[Snellius]

24. Fascinating.

Actually, I was only speaking on a physiological and neurological level. Cultural differences know less about because scientifically it is harder to test and verify. They really belong to much higher brain/vision functions which involve "pattern" recognition of various sorts. Taste, aesthetics, etc. Cross cultural studies have been done. An American teenager will think certain color combinations look cool together while to a Chinese theater goer they would look like shit. And yes, how we see is affected by what "patterns" we are accustomed to emphasize or ignore.

But saturation is much simpler than that. It's usually compared to what something looks like in bright sunlight or in a dim dawn. And that's pretty straightforward. What one person sees as bright is not going to appear to another person as dimly lit or gray. Colorized photos artificially saturate certain areas and desaturate others. Not realistic but a graphic style. My only criticism above is purely aesthetic, that the effect works best when the difference between the colors and the gray is more subtle. Otherwise, gets garish with too much in-your-face "pop", as they say. There is a compensating mechanism already at work called the "constancies" that compensates for such differences but too much to get into. Basically, the brain itself, Photoshops what we see. Subtle differences are automatically enhanced. Not so subtle push it too far.

Thanks for the really interesting discussion. It's a very cool topic.