Dark and Light Adaptation — Key Facts
Adaptation processes allow the eye to cover a huge range of brightnesses (on the order of 10^11),
but adaptation is a temporal process. Full light adaptation takes about 20–30 minutes, the practical
part — 5–8 minutes; dark adaptation shows a characteristic "break" during the transition from cones
to rods and depends on the level of pre-adaptation. These facts influence how to plan changes in
scenes/zones of lighting and delays between critical scene changes.
Key Idea: To maintain the sensation of brightness, it is better to increase brightness gradually
or keep contrast local, rather than flooding the scene all at once.
