Have you ever blown through a red light in your car, and as soon as you got through the intersection you realized what you had just done? Other than worrying about whether a cop saw what you did, you may have realized that your eyes saw the red light, but your mind did not register the perception and respond as usual so you could stop and wait for the light to change. What this kind of incident illustrates is that human vision is made up of two distinct functions, what our eyes see and what our mind perceives. As well as a third factor memory, which allows us to not pay conscious attention to everything familiar our eyes see in the course of daily activities, otherwise we would never get anything accomplished if we had to consciously deal with everything in our vision familiar or not.

This rather enigmatic movie title came to mind this week after engaging in both live and virtual e-mail conversation about the problem of “prints too dark” I have reported and commented on recently. It seems those most likely to have a knowledgeable understanding of the technical cause of this phenomenon, and any possible solutions are the least likely to want to admit the problem even exists. And if photographer computer users are obtaining too dark prints it is because they are at fault: either their home/office environment in which they do their photo processing on a computer is non-standard or their illumination for print viewing is inadequate.

The “prints too dark” problem inadvertently involves almost every aspect of computer image processing, displays, printers and their drivers, color management, and of course image editing. Yet it is just a single issue of prints that don’t match the screen in density/brightness. The explanation of why the problem seems insoluble is that all of these separate but involved functions are the domains of companies which compete with one another in a marketplace that discourages standards. For instance the driver interface for each brand of printer is different, as are the on-screen controls of each brand of LCD display. And of course the people who run these companies and the technical people who design the products do not see reality from the same perspective as users, who of course are an even more diverse population.

I just received one of many statements from photographers that the current digital technology is complex and confusing, so it’s hard to understand. I could assume from that many think digital follows what analog film photography established. But that also assumes that the photographic process was understood as it has been for over a century, but sadly both assumptions are mixed up by many mythical and fantastic ideas and beliefs that have confused many if not most for as long as the 50 some years I’ve been a photographer. And it has not been helped by an industry and technology that now uses terms like resolution, which on film meant how fine the detail was resolved sharply, to its digital meaning that defines the size of an image in pixels.