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Rang

Colour constancy

The brain's knack of seeing an object as the same colour under very different lighting.

A banana looks yellow at noon, at sunset and under a lamp, even though the light reaching the eye from it is very different each time. The brain judges the colour of the lighting and corrects for it. This is colour constancy. It usually works so well that we never notice. It can also go wrong or differ between people, as in a photograph of a dress that spread online in 2015, which some viewers saw as blue and black and others as white and gold. Cameras imitate the process with white balance.

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