Eric's Lecture

• Human Visual System (hvs)
• Need to understand how the hvs works if we want to create visual technologies that look REAL or can create images that look real (ie. camera)
• Cannot see color in very low light (only using rods, which only detect blue)
• The best part of human vision uses 6 million cones--6mp is six million sensors, but we still see better with our eyes than these sensors could ever do.
• 400 years ago they decided we see in red, green, & blue (some women see in 4 colors, also orange and yellow) and we still haven't proved it.
• All tetras have fathers who are colorblind--the gene that makes them colorblind in the male is what makes them hypersensitive in the female. They're larger and theoretically can receive more information like a radio antenna; has to do with the wavelength of light
• The standard color chart was developed under nonscientific settings by two Germans on a rainy day.
• Cameras can't capture all the colors our eye can, which is why none of our photos look real
• Printers can only ever print a few colors--it's a little sad.
• Make the levels right when you take the picture, not in Photoshop --YEAH RIGHT. This is pretty much impossible to do 100% of the time. Clearly if you didn't have to change the levels of a photo, it would be better, but when you're out in the field the time it would take to achieve this is almost never realistically feasible. NEVER. Keeping all the information intact is definitely the ideal, so when image processing technologies become more advanced you will have all of your data. Duh. Just save it as a separate file when you edit it. You can't tell a photographer not to make their photos look the best we can achieve right now in case we come up with better technology later. That's like saying since your kid will get a B on his test if he studies by himself, you shouldn't help him study so he can get an A. Seriously. Don't be a twit.
• We use Jpeg as a standard and that's bad. There's a really good reason we use it as the commercial standard--it's not enormous. Get over it. If you're shooting in JPG, you aren't losing anything by keeping it that way, and decent RAW compressors are way too expensive for the average Joe to get and the files are too big for normal consumers to keep around. I'm a photophile too, but this guy's ridiculous.
• Temporal order
• Okay, seriously? The preachiness is really annoying. Yes, our video technology today doesn't necessarily give us images that look real. But haven't other people already proven that we as human beings aren't comfortable with things like that which look too real? Seriously, I'm okay with not being able to track the total arc of a baseball on the TV. I'll get by. Not to take away--he's very smart, and he knows a lot about processing images. but he's very VERY OBVIOUSLY not a photographer. No one WANTS a photo to look exactly real. And besides, it's physically impossible to have an image be a copy of reality because there's no depth. You can't make a 2-D image look 3-D. Just can't do it.
• Wave-based imaging sensors are the "wave" of the future. Ha ha, I'm a riot.
• This lecture is making me really cranky.
• Long-term storage -- thanks for being depressing. I needed that. This discussion wasn't really constructive at all. In any way. Because he said the same thing over and over and over again. I've never heard anyone say "in perpetuity" so many times in ten minutes.