Seeing, adapting to, and reproducing the appearance of nature

The perception of color in nature is a complex multidimensional phenomenon. The vast range and high dimensionality of the light stimulus in a natural scene is reduced in range and dimension by the human visual system. The color experience is reduced to the appearance attributes of brightness, lightness, colorfulness, chroma, saturation, and hue from spectral energy distributions in the scene, while the vast range of light levels present in the world is reduced to a more manageable perceptual range through local adaptation. These processes set the stage for our efforts to capture, process, and reproduce the colors of nature as well as make artistic interpretations of them. This paper reviews the challenges involved in accurately capturing and reproducing optical phenomena observed in nature.