A while ago I noticed how the color of objects gets progressively darker the dimmer the light source is, up until everything looking completely black if there's none, at least to our eyes. And then i also realized this happens the same the other way around, as if the light source is bright enough, it can make objects look completely white.
Just to expand on the key point about colour constancy, through most of this range you would resolve the appearance of this scene into a perception of an object and a perception of illumination, and through most of the middle part of this range the colour perceived as belonging to the object would be relatively stable. So even when everything looks dark or bright, up to a point your perception might still be of a similarly coloured red object under dim and bright illumination respectively.
Now this colour perceived as belonging to the object tends to converge on its perceived colour in the illumination that our colour vision evolved to contend with and under which it works best, namely daylight. And while this colour is indeed a perception and not a physical property, few of us are so philosophically pure that we would not in our everyday life think of this colour perceived in daylight as being the "true" colour of the object.
djcbriggs t1_is83vrd wrote
Reply to comment by albasri in How do we know the exact color of things? by ItzzStrike
A while ago I noticed how the color of objects gets progressively darker the dimmer the light source is, up until everything looking completely black if there's none, at least to our eyes. And then i also realized this happens the same the other way around, as if the light source is bright enough, it can make objects look completely white.
Just to expand on the key point about colour constancy, through most of this range you would resolve the appearance of this scene into a perception of an object and a perception of illumination, and through most of the middle part of this range the colour perceived as belonging to the object would be relatively stable. So even when everything looks dark or bright, up to a point your perception might still be of a similarly coloured red object under dim and bright illumination respectively.
Now this colour perceived as belonging to the object tends to converge on its perceived colour in the illumination that our colour vision evolved to contend with and under which it works best, namely daylight. And while this colour is indeed a perception and not a physical property, few of us are so philosophically pure that we would not in our everyday life think of this colour perceived in daylight as being the "true" colour of the object.