Human eyes vs camera question

[vojm]

I think I read somewhere that compared a human eye to a camera saying we are able to see more range of exposure vs a camera. (Does anyone know what I'm talking about? )

My question is, is there anything being done to try and make cameras better or is this a physical limitation that we won't be able to fix?

[Jonbar18]

It's a physical limitation. Cameras are getting better, but they're never going to match the eye.
A lot of people use HDR (high dynamic range) to overcome this. Basically, HDR is using 2 or more versions of an image, with different exposures, and combine them to make a larger range

A good starting point

[mokka]

Most of the 'huh why does this photo look like crap when the scene looked awesome?' moments suffered by people getting to grips with photography as an art-form are due to the difference between the camera and human eye/brain combo. I'll list a few important points for brevity.

- As mentioned, the human eye can perceive a much larger range of luminosities simultaneously than either film or digital sensors. The brain augments this too by performing a sort of biological HDR and rapidly fitting together all the varying images passed to it by your eyes into one image.

-As with dynamic range, but substitute focus. It's not so much that your eyes have a larger DOF, but that they will refocus for everything they are looking at and your brain performs a sort of biological DOF stacking.

-The image your brain builds up of a scene exaggerates what is important to you and ignores all the paraphernalia. This explains why you only noticed that litter bin or white van when you looked at the photograph and not when you took it.

-You see in 3D, the sense of depth adds to a scene, makes objects that are closer or further away than the rest of the scene stand out or fall back. Your camera doesn't... this is why something close to the camera that seems to dominate the scene you see, struggles to stand out against the background in the photo.

-Your brain paints in gaps in the image and adjusts and corrects things to match what you expect to see. You will see the things you know to be white as white, in a sort of biological white-balance adjustment, your brain will see flat things as flat, straight things and straight and level things as level, meaning you may not realise until you view the photo that the horizon wasn't straight, you were viewing the subject from a slightly oblique angle and lens distortion has made a straight line appear curved.

-In short your eyes collect information but your brain creates an image using a large slab of creativity, the image your brain paints may or may not bear any resemblance to the real thing. This is how most optical illusions work. The way you see something may be totally different to what someone else sees, and the camera is just a tool, along with any post-processing tools you have that ultimately create the image you want to create, which may or may not reflect what you 'saw' when you were there. This is also a good argument for there being no such thing as an 'unedited' photo.

[vojm]

Jonbar - thanks for the link!

Mokka - thanks for the detailed explanation!

As I'm getting into photography, the nerd side of me is always wondering how technology could get better to aid in producing the image we want. What triggered my question was really just because it makes me scratch my had knowing that after 100+ years of film and around 10 years of digital, man still can't make a camera that produces the dynamic range our eyes can see.

It makes more sense now how Mokka explained that it is our brain that is doing a huge amount of on the fly "post processing".

[nickbedford]

Some articles mention an instantaneous dynamic range (i.e. one exposure) of 6.5 stops but I call that bullsh!t. I can perceive far, far greater dynamic range at one single moment in time than any 12-13 stop DSLR can.