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Lighting Basics

2.1   Psychology of Perception

How we see changes in scene brightness should be appreciated when lighting for television, film and theatre, namely the logarithmic nature of the eye/brain.

Logarithmic Perception

Most human perception operates in a logarithmic manner, e.g. changes in pitch, changes in loudness and also our perception of changes in brightness. What is meant by a logarithmic law? A logarithmic change, or progression, is when each succeeding term of a series of numbers is a common multiple of the previous one, for example:

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The logarithmic scale of the changes produces a fixed increment scale, i.e. equal changes. ...

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