Marvin,
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you paint a gray scale (equal steps from white to black) hold it up and compare it to a scene of normal contrast, (containing light and shadow) you will see that natures range is greater than paint's range.
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Well, that's what you said to do, and that's what I did. I did not see that nature's range was greater than paint's range; if anything, it was the other way around.
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it's obvious that you are completely misunderstanding my point.
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But I reasoned that, since the amount of light reaching my eye from a source diminishes as the inverse square of the distance from the source, it might not be a fair comparison to hold the value scale close to me while most of the elements of the scene were in the background. So I also viewed the value scale under the conditions described to see if that would make a difference. It didn't. I was just trying to be thorough.
Now you advise us to take a spot photometer and set up a scene with black and white objects and take readings off various parts of the scene to compare with readings from the value scale. Neither I, nor any other contributors to this lengthy thread, has quarreled with you over the claim that a photometer might record a wider range of intensities from various regions of an arbitrary scene than it would from a painted value scale. I accepted it when you brought it up earlier. However, you asked us to "see that natures range is greater than paint's range". Performing the exercise with the value scale in my backyard, I was unable to see that. In order to know that "natures range is greater than paint's range", I need to use a photometer or some other quantum counting device: I am unable to see it directly because of the operating characteristics of the visual system presented at the beginning of the thread. Our eyes do not see nature's full range of intensities, and even if we could transfer that full range to canvas, we still couldn't see it.
I think we have a genuine disagreement here. Evidently you don't accept that the visual system functions in the fashion that I claim. I'll be happy to provide references. There's nothing even mildly controversial in my presentation. I don't know how you might think it works, but below are some demonstrations that will show that it doesn't operate anything like a photometer, in case that's what you have in mind.
Finally, your statements on the difficulties of matching hue, chroma, and value are pretty much a summary of the last paragraphs of my previous post, so I've no bone to pick with you there. If there's any disagreement it would be that I see the impossibility of matching all these variables more as a matter of practicality, whereas you seem to see it more as a matter of principle. By practicality, I mean that I would have gotten a better result with cad. red light, but I was out of it. Since it was just for a forum post, I went ahead anyway. If I had a commission deposit from Ms. Piedmont for a portrait with poppies, I would have at least bought some cad. red light and checked out other paints to get a better result. If I had a commission to paint both sides of the entire Great Wall of China with a Calif. poppy motif, I could go to a paint company and say "I need 200,000 200 ml tubes of paint that matches this poppy, so we won't have to waste a lot of time mixing. I can pay $20/ tube. Here's an upfront payment of $2,000,000 to get started, balance paid when you deliver. How soon can you have them for me?" Given enough incentive, almost anything can be matched.