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# I know a little about this.
You know your eyes have rods and cones? Well one of them does the edge detecting (usually by differences in luminance) and one of them does the colour detecting - I forget which way round it is.
Now if you have two very different colours of equal luminance next to each other, your eyes have trouble deciding where the edges are.
For example - impression at sunrise by Monet - If you turn this into a greyscale, the sun practically disappears. - The reason it seems so ephemeral is that your eyes can't be sure exactly where it is because they don't know where the edges of it are because the luminance of the sun and the sky against which it sits are practically the same.
(, Sat 17 Sep 2011, 23:52, archived)
# Whoa
I just tried the Monet thing. It's hard to believe it's going to work because the sun is such an intense colour against the sky. But in greyscale it just looks like a vague circular indent in the canvas. Thanks for sharing this, I'm going to look into it further.
(, Sun 18 Sep 2011, 1:48, archived)