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We’re talking about our woefully bad color perception over the next few weeks.

Not just yours but mine too. If you’re human, color simply isn’t your strong point.

And our ineptness really shows in the autumn.

If you missed Part One or if you didn’t get a chance to test your color vision yet, catch up here.

Trust me, take the test!

Until you see how off your color game is, you can’t fix it.

A Shot in the Dark

My husband and I are not compatible.

We’re both up before the sun; at least we have this in common.

I usually head to the kitchen for tea and toast, then I’ll putz around until he’s out of the bathroom.

At which point he flicks on every single freakin’ light and I scurry to a dark corner, hissing at the glare.

We’ve tried to find a compromise but there is no happy medium between eleventy billion gigawatts and Nosferatu. He can’t see a darned thing in the dark and I’m blinded by the light.

Basically, I’m descended from a long line of vicious preternatural predators…

And his ancestors were probably accountants.

Let’s take a walk in the woods.

You remember last week’s photograph, right? Let’s go for a stroll there.

Only let’s do it at night.

This is what our woodsy scene looks like in grayscale.

The woods are darker than you remember, eh?

If we’re just looking at values, the colors in our forest are mostly N9, N10, and black.

But that’s not what you saw last week was it?

Ah ha! That’s your predator brain at work.

Our brains do a lot of secret data processing. It’s all behind the scenes, we don’t even realize it’s happening.

One of the reasons I can butter my bread in the pitch black while my husband bumbles around like Mr. Magoo is because my eyes can detect weak photons. My ancestors lived in caves a lot longer than his.

But there’s also something else going on:

I have better spacial memory than he does.

I’ve noticed I rely on intuition in the dark. Move the couch or the tea bags and I’m just as klutzy as my husband, so it’s not entirely about my eyes.

Our predator brain— analyzing and memorizing.

We are constant observers. We absorb a lot of visual information when the light is right.

We then apply that knowledge on our way to the bathroom at 3am.

So this is closer to what you’d see on our midnight walk in the woods.

You’re not only seeing what you see, your brain is also checking the rolodex to remember where everything was when you last saw it best. You see the leafy bushes to the right and the tree roots along the path because you know they’re there.

It’s a bit like time travel, your brain fills today’s dark gaps with information from yesterday. You’re seeing two worlds at once.

We do this with color too.

We can’t see color in the dark. Not you, not Mr. Magoo, not even me with my vampiric eyes.

Our color vision disappears after dark.

The ol’ rods and cones at the back of your eyeballs do not work when the light is low.

But you’d never know it from your coloring.

You did it last week— I asked what color you saw in the dim forest and your brain quickly pulled up a full palette of mid-day color.

You didn’t even realize you were doing it.

We fill the dark gaps with daylight info.

And you’ll see this a lot from card makers at Halloween. They’ll color a bunch of brightly lit Trick-or-Treaters on a black background with nothing but a small moon in the sky.

Even your memories are warped. Think back to your best Halloween costume ever. Now remember knocking on doors in that costume.

You’re picturing yourself in vivid Technicolor, aren’t you?

Psstttt… it was dark outside.

The biggest hurdle between you and realistic depth and dimension is your predator brain.

And I know this is going to sound strange because we’re used to attributing our failures to stupidity but here’s the a break from the dumb:

Your brain is too smart for realistic art.

It’s hard enough to see colors accurately. It’s even harder to remember them correctly.

But it all gets messed up even more when your tiger brain starts making automatic adjustments to your real-time vision with color memories from the past.

We’re not stalking prey in the forest anymore, yet we still see the world with a hunter’s eye.

When your coloring has a little bit of depth and some dimension but it still doesn’t look realistic, it’s usually because you took a shot in the dark with the color.

I’ll use this marker to shade orange. I hope it works.

Predator brains compile data to see what they need to see.

Artists look deeper to see what’s actually there.

It takes time and constant visual practice to see shady color for what it is…

Rather than what you expect it to be.

Next week, we’ll talk about skewing color.