>>4216950>What if my goal is to capture what the human eye sees with the goal of documenting realityThis is going to take a lot of explaining, but if you're actually interested here goes
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The human visual system is not currently completely understood. There are lots of tricks our brain uses to construct what we see, these evolved over millions of years to help us survive.
First thing to understand is physics of color. While color is perceptual phenomenon, it doesn't really exist, our experience is certainly real and maps to real things that other instruments can measure. The Spectral Power Distribution, or SPD, is what colors really are, and each SPD is a unique color. Its graph of wavelength vs brightness or power. All colors have SPDs, light sources, reflected light, prints, monitors, etc. These can be directly measured with a spectrophotometer or spectroradiometer(reflected vs emitted sources). Colors can be predicted with math if you know the materials SPD and the light source. There is a lot more to know, fluorescence and polarization effect SPDs in difficult to measure ways, but thats the basics. I like to think of this as "level 0"
