It's a problem that many of us probably haven't noticed, but affects us all: crappy coloring.A "weird, dark" boundary appears when you blur a colorful photo or Instagram picture on a computer, something that doesn't ordinarily happen offline because your eyes smoothly blend red, yellow, and green colors together.So, why does this happen? According to MinutePhysics, our brains are better at figuring out the brightness in dark scenes, while not as good as detecting the colors in bright scenes. Computers, however, register the same amount of colors no matter how bright or dark a scene is.Digital images are recorded on computers darker than what eyes in real life see them as because of storage issues. Our eyes can detect small differences in brightness of dark colors, but engineers took advantage of combining similar colors together to save space."When a digital camera captures an image, instead of storing brightness values it gives, they store their square roots," the video explains. "This samples the gradations of dark colors with more data points and bright colors with fewer data points, roughly imitating the characteristics of a human eye."This works until the image is blurred and those smudge-like lines are created because the blurring simply combines the average of colors from nearby pixels. That's evident when red and green colors are combined because it's not using the "real" colors recorded by the camera, but the ones it detects."To correctly blend the red and green and avoid the dark sludge, the computer should have first squared each of the brightnesses to undo the camera's square rooting, then averaged them, and then square-rooted it back."Ta-da! The sludge is gone and everything is right in the world.
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