On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 12:28 AM, David Rankin <David@rankinstudio.com>wrote:
The CMOS sensor is not inventing any new colors for these objects, it is simply designed to pick up wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum from around the start of UV light, into Infrared light. The CMOS is naturally good at detecting IR light, and has to have a filter put in front of it to block that light for your average end user photographer (I removed this filter to make the camera shoot IR again). You can tweak them a lot, but for the most part, each gas is going to give off its signature light wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum. Just because we cant see it with our eyes doesn't mean that is not the real color.
David, you've made a pretty good case, but that last sentence is not true. Humans perceive a very narrow part of the spectrum and we have assigned tints and colors according to where a particular wavelength falls in our sensory "window". The spectrum actually extends far beyond what we can detect. Many animals and insects can detect wavelengths far beyond the human range and see colors that we do not. We would see those colors as "black", whereas a moth might see them as something incredibly vivid. So the term "real color" has no meaning in that sense. The human visual perceptive window covers a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum dominated by photons. Colors a way for us to distinguish energy levels, and exists only our minds.