The invention of the digital intermediate DI process, and later the all-digital cinematography workflow, greatly expanded the possibilities for moonlight.
It can now be desaturated to produce something much closer to the silvery grey of reality. Conversely, it can be pushed towards cyan or even green in order to fit an orange-and-teal scheme of colour contrast. The colour temperature difference between the HMIs and the firelight is huge. If this were printed without a DI, the night would be candy blue and the faces would be red.
My favourite recent approach to moonlight was in the Amazon sci-fi series Tales from the Loop. The results are beautiful. Blue moonlight may be a cinematic myth, but Tales from the Loop is one of the few places where you can see real, naturally blue light in a night scene. If you would like to learn how to light and shoot night scenes, why not take my online course, Cinematic Lighting? Visit Udemy to sign up now. Skip to content What colour is moonlight?
The science bit According to universetoday. The Complete Guide to Colour by Tom Fraser has this to say: As an interesting example of the objectivity of colour, Western films were tinted blue to indicate nighttime, since our eyes detect mostly blue wavelengths in low light, but orange served the same function in films about the Far East, presumably in reference to the warm evening light there. The fovea is densely packed with cones, so we can read during the day. At night, however, the fovea becomes a blind spot.
The remaining peripheral vision isn't sharp enough to make out individual letters and words. Finally, we come to the blueshift. Consider this passage from a issue of the Journal of Vision :. Therefore if the cones are not being stimulated how do we perceive the blueness?
Khan and Sumanta N. Pattanaik, University of Central Florida. Right : A rod-cone interaction model accounting for the moonlight blueshift. Credit: Saad M. Pattanaik, University of Central Florida [ More ].
The authors of the study went on to propose a bio-electrical explanation--that signals from rods can spill into adjacent blue-sensitive cones under conditions of full-moon illumination see the diagram, right. This would create an illusion of blue. So there are still some mysteries in the moonlight. Look for them on Oct. Caveat Lunar: This story makes some generalizations about what people can see at night but, as with all things human, there are exceptions: Some people can read by moonlight; others have no trouble seeing the red petals of a moonlit rose.
These people have "moonvision," boosted by an extra-helping of rods or unusually sensitive cones. Are you one of them? The blueshift is sometimes attributed to the spectral response of rods. Although rods are nominally color blind, they do not respond equally to all colors: Rods are more sensitive to blue-green photons and less sensitive to red photons.
You can see this in your moonlit rose. By day, the red flower dominates the green leaves. At night, the situation is reversed. The green leaves are more vivid than the red flower. No matter which part of the rose stands out most, however, the ensemble is still gray. This is because the rods have no mechanism for separating colors. Shades of gray are all we get. Cones are able to separate colors because they come in three varieties: red-sensitive, green-sensitive, and blue-sensitive.
In this sense yes, moonlight is "yellower" than sunlight because it has a redder spectrum. The reason for the redder spectrum is that the reflectance of the moon gets larger at redder wavelengths, so as moonlight is reflected sunlight, it must be redder than sunlight.
As for our perception of moonlight, opinions vary. Whilst the light is probably too bright for true scotopic vision, it is likely not bright enough for full colour vision to be operative and therefore inferior mesopic vision takes over, with eye cells that are more sensitive to blue light - a. However, it must be pointed out that the difference between the solar and moon spectrum is not that big, especially considering that the eye works as a logarithmic intensity detector.
It is entirely possible that the difference is not big enough to be perceived by the eye, so that the broad spectrum of the moon basically appears white and that this is enhanced if it is seen against a dark sky.
In addition to the Purkinje effect, another thing that contributes to the different perception is contrast to ambient light :. They're in fact the same. Does the blue background make it seem a bit yellower to you? I'm not sure. But the effect is certainly a lot more pronounced if you're actually surrounded by blue sky. A white object on green background may still look white, but stare at a green screen for a few minutes and everything else will look purple-tinted. I think this actually has to do with colour receptors in the eye tiring out.
At night, your eyes have a lot of time to adapt to the white point, and thus everything will look bluer, including the moon. Add to this that traditional artificial light sources have a very low colour temperature — the eyes will adapt to those, more than to the remote natural light sources. I took photo at night 4AM of the same scene, lit by the full moon.
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