We can see colors because objects absorb some parts of the light spectrum when light rays touch them. But since light rays bounses of many objects before hitting our eyes, how do they contain information about colors of every object they touched?

Question

I mean, even if light source isnt directly seen and every photon has to bounce of more then one surface before reaching our eyes, colors of the objects around are still clearly distinguishable. How does that possible?

Sorry for bad english.

In: Physics

Answer 1

I’m not 100% sure I understand what you are asking, but think of it this way.

You are standing in a room. There is a white light bulb in the room. You have several other objects in the room, green, blue, yellow.

The light is generated as white, from the bulb, and hits the green object. The green object absorbs all colors EXCEPT green. The green is reflected and your eyes when looking at that object see the reflected color. So we see the object as green.

Same with the blue and yellow objects.

Now, if you had an object in the room that was in complete darkness except for only getting light from the green object, no matter what color that object really was, you would only see the remaining light that the green object didn’t absorb. If it was a mirror, for example, it would reflect green light. If it was a white object then it would look green since only green light reached it. If it was an object that absorbed green light, then the object would appear black.