system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How come our eyes can see both dark/light areas simultaneously while cameras can only be set to a specific exposure?
gpt
It's actually the same principle, just a difference in magnitude. Your eyes are able to perceive a contrast difference of 10-14 stops in a single "image". A digital camera usually falls somewhere around 11 stops, give or take. The difference is that your eye has an iris which can open or close to allow you to quickly switch "exposure" when you look from a brighter area to a darker area. This substantially increases the dynamic range you can perceive, up to as wide as 24 stops. Once a camera captures an image, its exposure is set and you can only look at the image as it was captured, so it appears to have a narrower range.