Aerial perspective

Color perspective characterizes the phenomenon that colors on two-dimensional images suggest different spatial distances. The phenomenon is partly psychological, partly determined by the physiology of the human eye.

The spatial impression of a two-dimensional photograph can be except by emphasizing the perspective considerably enhanced by appropriate color direction. One speaks in this context of colored plastic effect of the object colors. It is a peculiarity of nature, that the color and tonal values ​​of the background to pale, broken and appear colder, while the warm, bold colors seem to be the main focus. For this reason, yellow, orange and red are known as foreground colors, green, blue and violet as background colors. But the relations of the colors to each other yet to be determined by much more complicated parameters, especially by the light-dark contrast, the amount of contrast and simultaneous contrast ( color contrast ). For example appears contrary to the above rule violet on a white background as the foreground color, while yellow over white rather recedes. A particularly strong spatial effect is suggested by the color contrast of two mutually complementary object colors. For example, yellow on blue shows more clearly than the foreground color as red on blue. Here, the subjective sense of color and the relative size of the color space ( amount of contrast ) plays a crucial role. However, it is not advisable to derive from the above-mentioned phenomena fixed rules for the design image.

In the environment, the color perspective occurs as aerial perspective in appearance, a bluish background reinforces spatial depth.

Physically, plays a role that colors have different wavelengths and are refracted at different angles of optical systems. The result is that blue objects are represented by a sharper lens at a location other than red. Red objects are "earlier " mapped in the eye as blue. Are on a two-dimensional image of the same size objects contained in red and blue color, the lens of the eye is made convex when looking at the red object and acts like a magnifying glass while it flattens out while looking at a blue object in order to get a sharp image. The image projected onto the retina red area is therefore greater than the blue and appeared to be even closer.