How much oranger do red orange bags make oranges look?

Summary

Look at this orange: Now look at this orange: It’s the same orange. But, look how much more orange it looks with the red mesh on top of it: If you buy bags of oranges (at least at many places in the US), they frequently come in this red mesh bag. This bag makes the oranges look more orange. Oranger. Here’s what that looks like at a local grocery store: Ripe oranges are usually oranger, so this bag makes the oranges look better than they may actually be. Maybe the secret is to never buy bagged fruit, since it’s harder to evaluate the quality of each orange. This made me wonder — how does the bag change how we perceive the color? I thought this difference would be visible if we did some quick and tricky digital math: what if we had a picture of the orange with and without the bag under the same light and camera conditions, then checked the average pixel? Here are the results from 11 different orange photos, with and without the mesh: Orange Without bag With bag Avg. color without Avg. color with 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 There are a few interesting things here. First, the average pixel is not what I would expect it to be at all, to be honest. I even ran the average pixel calculation a second time with more advanced calculations, including some orange-only-masking to avoid non-orange colors, but I got similar results. They’re all much more brown than my eyes would assume when I look at the images. Weirdly, that kind of makes sense when you look at each image closely. Here’s a big trypophobia warning, but you can open the spoiler below. Click to see a close up photo of orange skin, which is kinda weird to be honest Look how much brown there really is when you look closely! Also, kind of gross. Kinda weird, right? This kind of makes sense though — this whole thing was motivated by the feeling that our eyes are tricked by colors, so it makes sense that our eyes are much less analytical than my computer averaging over all of the pixels. The other interesting thing is that th...