Toy
Afterimage Painter
Pick the colour you want to see. Stare at the one that gets you there.
- Toy
- Afterimage Painter
- What to do
- Choose a subject and a reveal surface, hold the dot for the countdown, then let the screen go blank.
- How it works
- Opponent-process adaptation, solved backwards. The field you stare at is a function of both the target colour and the surface you reveal it on, which is why the palette is a grid and not an inversion.
Every version of this demo you have seen shows you a colour-inverted picture and tells you to stare at it. That is the trick performed backwards. Inverting an image answers the question “what is the opposite of this colour”, and your retina was never asking that question.
What actually happens is adaptation. Holding your gaze still runs the gain down on whichever channels the field is driving hardest, and when the field goes away that suppression is still there for a few seconds, colouring whatever you look at next. So the afterimage is not a property of the picture. It is a property of the picture and the surface you look at afterwards, together.
Which is why this one is built the other way round. You choose the colour you want to arrive, and the surface you want it to arrive on, and the machine solves for the field that gets you there. Sometimes there is no such field, and the grid at the bottom of the toy is honest about which combinations those are. White targets want a light surface. Saturated hues want mid grey. Gold does better on warm paper than on the grey that beats it everywhere else. There is no single inverse, because there was never one question.
The shapes are blunt on purpose. An afterimage is low-resolution and it is gone in seconds, so anything with fine detail arrives as a smudge. Two to four flat tones is not a stylistic choice about retro graphics, it is the resolution limit of the medium you are printing on.
Runs in its own frame. Embeddable anywhere with [canvasapp slug="pov-painter"].