Colours in black and white: the depiction of lightness and brightness in achromatic engravings before the invention of photography.

Full Abstract

What is it like to see the world in black and white? In the pioneer days of cinema, when movies displayed grey worlds, was it true that no 'colours' were actually seen? Did every object seen in those projections appear grey in the same way? The answer is obviously no--people in those glorious days were seeing a world full of light, shadows, and objects in which colours were expressed in terms of lightness. But the marvels of grey worlds have not always been so richly displayed. Before the invention of photography, the depiction of scenes in black-and-white had to face some technical and perceptual challenges. We have studied the technical and perceptual constraints that XV-XVIII century engravers had to face in order to translate actual colours into shades of grey. An indeterminacy principle is considered, according to which artists had to prefer the representation of some object or scene features over others (for example brightness over lightness). The reasons for this lay between the kind of grey scale technically available and the kind of information used in the construction of 3-D scenes. With the invention of photography, photomechanical reproductions, and new printing solutions, artists had at their disposal a continuous grey scale that greatly reduces the constraints of the indeterminacy principle.

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Author information

Author/s: Zavagno, Daniele (D); Massironi, Manfredo (M);

Affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy. daniele.zavagno(-atsign-)unimib.it

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Perception (Perception), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-; vol 35 (issue 1) : pp 91-100

Dates: Created 2006/02/22; Completed 2006/05/30; Revised 2007/11/15;

PMID: 16491711, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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