Why can my eye pick up more color than a camera sensor at depth?

[nippurmagnum]

I just got back from Los Cabos, where I saw an awesome school of hammerheads at about 140 feet, which left an indelible impression. When I saw my video, the sharks looked far bluer than what my naked eye had perceived. I understand that water absorbs much of the light spectrum and mainly blue light is being reflected by the sharks, and that’s what the camera sensor is registering. But is there a layman’s terms explanation for why my eye is able to see the sharks rendered in something closer to their “true” color than the camera sensor does?

 

[tursiops]

Your brain does a running white-balance correction, with much more dynamic range than a camera sensor/processor can do.

 

[scubaozy]

WB is quite important, but that image is taken against the sun, so, auto wb should be as good as it can get. Try experimenting with iso/aperture/exposure values to match same experience with your eyes.

 

[Landau]

Most of your brain is devoted to image processing and pattern recognition - it can easily and clearly see the fish hiding in the kelp in great detail while at the same time filtering out the kelp and all the crud in water between you and the subject and enhancing the colors. But take a photo and look at it on screen or printed on paper and now you can barely see the fish because of the kelp and crud in the water and the colors are super dull.

Part of becoming a good photographer is learning what looks good once printed, or now days on the screen.

 

[wnissen]

A camera with the same sensitivity, resolution, and stabilization would be a multi million dollar scientific instrument. Color is basically a lie, based on the response of a complex system of biological receptors and neural processing that is only imperfectly approximated by a camera. In particular, your eyes will white balance in a way to increase contrast in a way cameras don’t.

 

[Hoag]

In addition to doing a real time white balance compensation, your brain also has the advantage of prior knowledge. You might look at something and know it is supposed to be a certain colour. Your brain will try to adjust what you perceive as that colour actually being where you think it should.

For instance, if while on the boat you see someone has something that is yellow. Underwater, at depth, your brain will compensate so that to as great an extent as possible, you will perceive it as yellow.

Your camera's sensor, on the other hand only registers the image based on the way it actually appears for a given white balance.

 

[OTF]

This is a good and very interesting question.

A physical color filter over the lens might be worth trying. Theoretically you can get more color that way than you can get in postproduction correction because the filter blocks out some of the blue light, forcing the sensor to take in more light from other parts of the spectrum. However your mileage may vary. It's not as good at white balance as the human brain. Farther away objects will still not come out properly colored.

Strobes are the other way.

Or check out some of the new research into machine learning color correction. That is the future.

 

[Steelyeyes]

Try Dive+. It does good things to UW photos and videos. It's not perfect but it's an improvement.

 

[tursiops]

Try Dive+. It does good things to UW photos and videos. It's not perfect but it's an improvement.

LAND & SEA SCUBA | Fast, Easy photo editing software is another do-it-all uw photo fix

 

[nippurmagnum]

Thanks for all the replies! To be clear, I wasn’t asking how to do WB on my camera or to get colors to look “real” in photographs - instead, I was asking how my brain manages to render a shark as brownish grey in my visual field when my camera sensor registers it as blue. A number of comments described how color perception is influenced by mental WB adjusted for preconceptions/expectations, which I find really interesting. I wonder if knowledge of the existence of that mental image processing mechanism will cause sharks to look bluer at depth on my next dive ...