I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about that. Our eyes have rods and cones, each with different opsin proteins that absorb light and trigger a cascade of chemical reactions. Cones are the ones that give us color – there are three types sensitive to different wavelengths, kinda like the RGB filters in a camera sensor. When light hits them, it changes the opsin’s shape, sending a signal through the retina to the brain. In a camera, we’re doing a digital approximation of that. The lenses focus light onto the sensor, but the sensor’s microlenses and color filter array mimic the eye’s trichromatic sensitivity. So the color you see in a photo is basically a translated version of what your retina is processing, filtered by the lens optics and the camera’s own response curves. It’s weird how biology and engineering line up, right?

I’ve noticed the cone curves and the RGB filters never match up perfectly – the camera’s red is a bit more yellowish, the green a touch cooler, and the blue ends up pulling in more cyan. Lens aberrations mess with that too; a slight chromatic shift from a wide‑angle lens will bleed color in the corners, so you can get a little hue wash at the edges. If we wanted to test it, I’d grab a cheap spectrometer, line up a light source, shine it on a human eye in a controlled booth and on a camera sensor side by side, then compare the two spectra. It’s a neat way to see how the biology of the eye and the engineering of the sensor stack up. Let’s set it up on a rainy Thursday – I’ll bring the gear, you bring the coffee.