It means that the colors should be correct. The sky on tv should look like the sky. The grass on tv should look like grass. If I look at the screen and then I look outside, it should look the same. HDR screens and sensors are getting pretty close, but almost everyone is using color grading so the advantage is gone. And after colors, don't get me started about motion and the 24fps abomination.
Well, I know what you mean, color is complicated. BUT, I can look at a hundred skys and they look like sky. I will look at the sky on the tv, and it looks like sky on the tv, not like the real sky. And sky is probably easy to replicate, but if you take the grass or leaves, or human skin, then the tv becomes funny most of the time.
> I will look at the sky on the tv, and it looks like sky on the tv, not like the real sky.
Well for starters you’re viewing the real sky in 3D and your TV is a 2D medium. Truly that immediately changes your perception and drastically. TV looks like TV no matter what.
> It means that the colors should be correct. The sky on tv should look like the sky. The grass on tv should look like grass.
It is not as clear cut as you think and is very much a gradient. I could send 10 different color gradings of the sky and grass to 10 different people and they could all say it looks “natural” to them, or a few would say it looks “off,” because our expectations of “natural” looks are not informed by any sort of objective rubric. Naturally if everyone says it’s off the common denominator is likely the colorist, but aside from that, the above generally holds. It’s why color grading with proper scopes and such is so important. You’re doing your best to meet the expectation for as many people as possible knowing that they will be looking on different devices, have different ideas of what a proper color is, are in different environments, etc. and ultimately you will still disappoint some folks. There are so many hardware factors at play stacked on top of an individual’s own expectations.
Even the color of the room you’re in or the color/intensity of the light in your peripheral vision will heavily influence how you perceive a color that is directly in front of you. Even if you walk around with a proper color reference chart checking everything it’s just always going to have a subjective element because you have your own opinion of what constitutes green grass.
In a way, this actually touches on a real issue. Instead of trying to please random ppl and make heuristics that work in arbitrary conditions, maybe start from the objective reality? I mean, for the start, take a picture, and then immediately compare it with the subject. If it looks identical then that's a good start. I haven't seen any device capable of doing this. Of course you would need the entire sensor-processing-screen chain to be calibrated for this.
Everything I talked about above applies even more so now that you’re trying to say “we’ll make a camera capture objective colors/reality.” That’s been a debate about cameras ever since the first images were taken. “The truth of the image.”
There is no such thing as the “correct” or “most natural” image. There is essentially no “true” image.
I completely agree. Theoretically you could capture and reproduce the entire spectrum for each pixel, but even that is not "true" because it is not the entire light field. But I still think that we can look at the picture on phone in the hand and at the subject just in front, and try to make them as similar as possible to our senses? This looks to me like a big improvement to the current state of affairs. Then you can always say to a critic: I checked just as i took the picture/movie, and this is exactly how the sky/grass/subject looked.
