The arrival of widely available colour film photography and subsequent pervasiveness of bland JPEG renders changed how humans perceive colour (and likely how they design with colour).
Until colour photography, humans didn’t really have a fixed shared anchor as to what the world looks like in general—including colours. All we had was words and paintings.
With consumer colour photography, suddenly it seems as if we have that anchor…
Except it’s not actually the case. Discarding the fact that our perception of colours and shapes is highly idiosyncratic and happens over time (never as a discrete standalone moment), there’s no medium that’s even remotely close to being capable of reproducing the vast dynamic ranges of scene-referred light values at exposure time (and in case of JPEG or film photography, that data is never available in the first place). What can be conveyed is the tiny range reproducible by screens, film or ink on paper—and unless you take charge of scene data interpretation with your favourite raw processing software, the conversion to that range is a result of camera or film manufacturer’s design.
…But even though there’s no true anchor, thinking your phone’s interpretation of reality is just that may be enough for this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy—after all, perception is a socio-psychological phenomenon. We may have used to have our own individual truths, but now it’s very common to believe that bland, sRGB-safe default capture interpretation by our camera or phone is the objective reality of what the world looks like (and anything else must be disclosed as “enhancement” or “processing”)—and it’s not easy for an individual to get rid of that notion if everyone around believes in it.
Even the author of tweets like this runs with the same fallacy, and appears to showcase film and digital captures (and even 3D renders?) side by side, even while those are artifacts of drastically different ways of interpreting scene data.
