warm colour + warm light = more saturation

warm colour + cool light = less saturation

overall rules

• when light colour approaches white, more of the object's natural colour will show
• when light is very saturated, regardless of brightness that colour will tend to replace the natural colour of the object (this reduces overall information levels in image)
• when light is too strong, overexposure will occur (not mentioned yet)

relationship between light colour and object's natural colour

• cg generated image

  

• general setup is a group of 16 cubes, towards the left is lower value, towards right is lower saturation

  

• grid view, top row shows what the light colour is, left row is object's colour when light is white, the rows next to it is what that colour is when influenced by non white light colours

  

  • in these examples all the 3 red light colours are all very high saturation, under these scenarios of very saturated red light shining at it, you basically can't tell what the original colour of the object is

    

• the trend you'll see now is that if the object's original colour is warm, the resulting colour all becomes very highly saturated red

  

• but when the object's original colour is cool and you shine saturated red light on it, the saturation will be decreased

  

• looking at the second column we can see that the saturation isn't as high as above

  

• the second column of results is when the red travels along the top edge of colour picker, reducing in saturation towards white

  

• here you'll see as the saturation of the light decreases, the more we see of the object's original colour