Eli5: why when you take pictures with your phone (for example, of a beautiful sunset) the colours and proportions don’t look as good as with the human eye?
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Your organic perception is more or less analog. You can see and perceive a continuous and smooth spectrum of light and color.
Computer vision is digital, and color is made up of 3 8 bit numbers. This is stored as either RGB (red, green, blue) or HSL (hue, saturation, luminance). This means that there’s limits to the possible colors a computer can display. HSL works more intuitively for us humans because it maps the actual RGB values of displays to a wheel of colors that we can then manipulate in brightness (how we get black in HSL) and saturation from white to full color. In contrast, changing one value in RGB just a little makes significant and often counterintuitive changes to the color.
The other thing at play here is the way these values are stored in memory. In memory, the data in an image is stored as square roots of the values read by the camera. This causes some data loss on display, and significant data loss or corruption when manipulating the image if you aren’t using a program that accounts for it.
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