Relationship between Light and Saturation

[mister3d]

Perhaps because as the intensity goes from 1 and higher, the color starts to disappear as the intensity goes up. For example if you take a bulb of red but make it 1000 times brighter it should become "white". But I'm not sure as long as laser stays the same though it's very intense.

[Piflik]

[...]white light should desaturate colors, since white color has all the spectrum so it should decrease the purity of colors. Colored lights should saturate colors of its own and desaturate the rest.[...]


Not really, no...white light contains the full spectrum, so any object will reflect the complete spectrum that isn't absorbed. This will lead to saturated colors (a red sphere will absorb green and blue and reflect red...simplified).
Colored light misses part of the spectrum, and if that gap doesn't exactly fit in the absorbed spectrum of the object, the reflected light will miss that part of the spectrum, too, so the colors are less saturated (the same red sphere will be less saturated, if the red light doesn't contain the full spectrum the sphere would reflect...might be unnoticeable to the bare eye, if the color shift is small enough).
If it fits, there is no benefit in comparison to white light.

[ndeboar]

I've actually thought about taking a photo of, say, a red ball, and measuring the saturation at various shades to work out the basic model. But i think a lot of studios simple just approximate it, and just decrease saturation around the hi lights of an image.

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