Human eye response | Bruce Percy
We are in fact, all blind to true luminosity in the real world. Whereas digital cameras aren’t: they are able to see that the sky is 4 stops brighter than the ground. But just because they can see it – it doesn’t mean digital cameras are giving us what we want. It just means that digital cameras don’t see the way we see. And that’s the important bit.We tend to view everything we look at, as a mid-exposure. When I look at the sky, in my mind I see a mid-exposure of it. And when I look at the ground, I see a mid-exposure of it also. As my eye scans around, I build up an internal representation of the world – a collage or collection of mid-exposures.This is why I don’t agree with the concept that ‚if a scene can fit inside the entire histogram, then we don’t need grads‘. This belief, lacks understanding of what it is we are trying to do with grads in the first place and also what a histogram represents…….
Source: Human eye response — Bruce Percy