The Science of Light, as explained by Lapis Lazuli
so i made this color edit of a screenshot of steven universe -
you’d expect that to kind of be the case, like, oh, her colors are darker, in low light she’d be pitch black, that’s logical, but light and color work in mysterious ways. i actually wanna talk about this because it’s a cool scientific learning experience. so @smug-torracat let’s talk about the physics of light!
here’s a side-by-side comparison of the original (left) and my edit (right), with lapis in white sunlight. white light is a mixture of the entirety of the light spectrum and has every color. so lapis here absorbs all the colors in white light except for blue, which she reflects thus making her blue to our eyes.
the bulb is the sun, the filter is lapis’s skin/dress/hair, the square on the right is our eyes.
now let’s look at a screenshot of lapis in mirror gem/ocean gem.
in this scene, it’s pretty dark, and everything has a vaguely dark blue filter over everything. we can assume that this scene takes place in surroundings with a mixture of low blue light and low white light.
this is my best attempt at recreating the light conditions in the scene. here, lapis is standing in both low blue and low white light. it’s not perfect, but you can see that the lapis on the right has colors extremely similar to the lapis in the mirror gem/ocean gem screenshot.
okay, why isn’t she black? white light + blue light + blue filter = blue appearance.
if the surroundings (the bulb) are bathing lapis (the blue filter) in blue light, then she’s absorbing nothing. blue objects can’t absorb blue light, so the blue light reflects and we (the square on the right) see nothing but more blue.
black is the absence of any color in the light spectrum. in order for us to see black, all light from an object would need to be absorbed. so for lapis to appear black, she would need to be in either red or green light.
if she’s in red light, there’s no blue light to reflect off of her clothes and back to our eyes. blue objects absorb all red light, making the object appear to us as completely black.
you can see how her hair and triangles on her outfit on the right appear almost entirely black, and she’s in mostly shades of gray.
so there you have it - my recolored lapis matches mirror gem/ocean gem lapis without a hitch. yay, colors!
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