Ok, let’s face it. We all tend to notice those beautiful sparkling blue eyes, right? With all the media coverage they get, the songs devoted to them, and the attention they garner, wouldn’t it be fun to believe that they actually existed. Sorry. I hate to tell you this. Your wife, husband, lover, or fantasy probably has brown eyes or neutral gray at the very best.
I always enjoy sharing this little piece of information with students when we talk about perception and how the human mind lies to us. That’s not a bad thing, it makes life more vivid and interesting, but it has little to do with what is really there.
A couple of years ago I was in the middle of reading Dan Margulis’ book The Canyon Conundrum when a former student contacted me. She works as a digital artist at a higher end photography studio in Orlando. The studio was doing a series of prints where they were creating black & white images while leaving the pupils colored. The process worked fine with brown eyes and green eyes, but when it came to the images of blue-eyed beauties, the pupils kept coming out brownish. The student wanted to know what was going on.
Being curious, I immediately opened several images and tried to reproduce the effect and the results. In PhotoShop I selected everything except the pupils, applied a channel-mixer adjustment with a monochrome output and WALLAH, I got the same results.
The problem is how the human mind perceives color. Our perception of color is also based on relativity. The mind simultaneously compares contrast in luminosity, while also evaluating what we see as being more green or magenta, and also either more blue or yellow (Think of this as a 3-D color model, where Luminosity is your y-axis, magenta/green is your x-axis, and yellow/blue is your z-axis). This is also how the LAB color model evaluates pixels.
Blue eyes tend to occur in lighter skinned people who have fairly high amounts of yellow and magenta in their skin tones. On a relative basis, a pale brown pupil is less yellow than surrounding colors and therefore is perceived as blue (being closer to blue than surrounding colors). This is also why when you try to sample out the color of a blue eye, you end up with all those strange non-blue tones. The human body does not produce blue pigment. Therefore it is a physical impossibility to actually have a blue eye.
Playing further with this concept we can adjust the color balance in our images and make relatively neutral pupil colors appear in all sorts of interesting ways.
The above have the pupils remaining untouched.
Below I took all saturation out of the pupils (nuetral gray) and changed the color balance of the image. The pupils never change but what we perceive her eye color to be certainly does. (Stare at each pupil individually and they will appear different. If you look at all 4 simultaneously they will look the same.)
I remember sitting in class when you told us this fact. During that time, I was dating this guy whose eyes were absolutely gorgeous. They were blue, or so I had thought. It amazes me how argumentative people become when you tell them that blue eyes do not exist, but it really does have everything to do with the way it is perceived.
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