Looking isn't Seeing

We look with our eyes, but we interpret with our brains. So, seeing isn't really believing. Believing is seeing or perceiving.

A perfect example of this happens about ten days after humans are born. Up to that point infants "see" the world inverted or upside down. Then suddenly everything is right-side up. This can be verified by putting inverter glasses on an adult. After again about ten days, they "see" the world right-side up. Then when they take off the glasses, for a period everything is inverted again.

This all goes to show that it is really our brains that are "seeing" or interpreting the stimuli from the environment that is registering on our retinas. The eye itself has not changed, we simply reinterpret the signals from the rods and cones on our retina to be coherent with what we know or believe to be true about our environment.

The following little video explains why this is.

What does that have to do with the wide-format business? Simply this: we don't know what our clients are really "seeing." So we need an objective reference: for example with color reproduction. A reference like a color swatch book from Pantone or a paint manufacturer is an ideal example. The client references a specific color, and we use custom color profiling and lookup tables to reproduce that color as visually similar as possible. Now we are on the same page as our customer without trying in vain to "see" what they mean when they say "Red" or whatever color.