Close up veiw of text with and without grayscale color filter
2015-01-13azim58 - Close up veiw of text with and without grayscale color filter
I've noticed that I prefer looking at a screen with the grayscale compiz
color filter in Linux as opposed to a screen with all of the colors. From
what I have read, the major color which interferes with visual acuity
resulting in more blurred vision as well as the color which interferes
with "dark adaptation" is the color blue. The human eye also has special
(and fewer receptors) in the eye for the color blue than red or green.
These receptors also influence melatonin production which affects human
sleep cycles.
What started to puzzle me about my preference for the grayscale compiz
color filter is that I preferred it even if there was no color and just
text on the page. In this situation, there was only black and white text
anyway so it shouldn't have really made a difference. Then I remembered
about anti-aliasing. Here is an excerpt from wikipedia about the
anti-aliasing of text
===========================================================================
Anti-aliasing is often applied in rendering text on a computer screen to
suggest smooth contours that better emulate the appearance of text
produced by conventional ink-and-paper printing.
Particularly with fonts displayed on typical LCD screens, it is common to
use subpixel rendering techniques like ClearType. Subpixel rendering
requires special color-balanced anti-aliasing filters to turn what would
be severe color distortion into barely-noticeable color fringes.
===========================================================================
I took some screenshots of my computer and zoomed in to prove for sure
that there was some color around the anti-aliased text.
Screenshots without Grayscale Color Filter
Screenshots with Grayscale Color Filter