Pixiq

I love visual illusions, those fun illustration where you’re sure apples are apples and oranges are oranges. You know this because your eyes say that’s what it is.  Then you find out that no, apples are actually oranges, your eyes lied, and you’re left scratching your head. And rubbing your eyes. One illusion I really like is fig. 1. Take a look. The horizontal lines seem to tilt at angles. In reality, the horizontal lines are all parallel and completely horizontal. Your eyes say no way, but the reality is “way”. Every thing is square and all the horizontals are horizontal. Take a straight edge or ruler and run it down the image. Love it. 

Another illusion I love is fig 2. Looks like 4 colors, but in reality, it's made up of only three colors. The blue and green are the same color. Because of how the other two colors surround that color affects how your eyes perceive those colors. The image below, fig. 3, has a big dot in the middle to act as the proof. The fact that our eyes can be so easily be fooled is why we use a mechanical device, like a Color Munki or an Eye1, to calibrate out monitors and printers. It's also why you should have the background of your computer set to a neutral grey.

So why do we care about these parlor tricks? Although if you went to a University like MIT, these are serious visual studies, not parlor tricks by a long shot. They help explain how our eyes see. Knowing some of these illusions help us with our photos. Learning that our eyes can be tracked when viewing photos, we know that our eyes will go from dark into light, from out of focus into sharpness. Knowing these issues we can add vignetting to images to keep viewers “in” the photo, like the photo of the Japanese lanterns fig. 4 without a vignette. In the next photo, fig 5, I added a vignette with a NIK plug-in, Color EFEX Pro, using the Lighten center, darken edges. I like this plug-in because it’s fast, flexible to fine-tune and adjust, and has a great vignette.

Oh, and by the way, shameless plug, I’ll be doing a free webinar (What a coincidence!)  at NIK Software’s website this Tuesday, January 11 called “How Our Eyes See”. Go to http://www.niksoftware.com to the “learn” tab, then to “live training”. Or go directly to this link to read the description and sign up.  It’s FREE. I’ll be going over more visual illusions and relate them to some of my photos. Did I mention it’s free? Come by if you get a chance.

If you miss it, I’ll be heartbroken. But when I get over that, I’ll be doing more on this subject on future Pixiq articles. Love this stuff.