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Illuminightmare: Explore the Supernatural with Your Magic Three-Color Lens by Lucy Brownridge
kittykult's review
3.0
The concept of this book is that each page is a layered image - one in blue, one in green, and one in red. With a pair of lenses or a color filter app on your phone, you can explore 10 of the most haunted locations across the world. The green lens shows the geography, the red lens shows you important historical and cultural events, and the blue lens shows the supernatural experiences, mythology, folklore, and dark secrets going on behind the scenes. There is a "cheat sheet" that tells you about each of the images and you can find them kind of in "Where's Waldo" fashion.
It's a cool concept and definitely looks cool, but there are some kinks to the execution. The app did not work, which was the first bump as I have horrible eyesight and holding the color filters over my regular glasses was difficult. The second is that the lenses do not always filter in an ideal way - the red was much stronger than the other two and worked really well, while the green had some bleed-through from the other colors and thus there was some "ghosting" of the images which was a bit distracting. The blue, on the other hand, was so dark that it concealed even the blue lines, and it was difficult to see much of the detail of the "supernatural" parts, which is the entire point of this book. I wish the supernatural parts had been in red, since it is the clearer lens and thus should be the focus of the book. This could have been an issue entirely related to my eyesight, but I tried it in different levels of lighting, different distances between the lens and paper, with and without my glasses, and since the app did not work I am unable to say that it was solely due to my own eyesight.
I, did, however, have much more fun just looking at the layered images as a whole without the glasses and looking at the "image key" to pick out images that way. The layered images look like a beautiful, trippy collage. I will still be giving the other books in this series a try, but I am kind of bummed that this was the one I was most excited about and it was a challenging experience due to the lenses.
Note: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley. I was not compensated in any other fashion for the review and the opinions reflected below are entirely my own. Special thanks to the publisher and author for providing the copy. Let me be the first to apologize for taking ages to get around to reviewing this book even though I received it before it was published. I am a bad little bean.
It's a cool concept and definitely looks cool, but there are some kinks to the execution. The app did not work, which was the first bump as I have horrible eyesight and holding the color filters over my regular glasses was difficult. The second is that the lenses do not always filter in an ideal way - the red was much stronger than the other two and worked really well, while the green had some bleed-through from the other colors and thus there was some "ghosting" of the images which was a bit distracting. The blue, on the other hand, was so dark that it concealed even the blue lines, and it was difficult to see much of the detail of the "supernatural" parts, which is the entire point of this book. I wish the supernatural parts had been in red, since it is the clearer lens and thus should be the focus of the book. This could have been an issue entirely related to my eyesight, but I tried it in different levels of lighting, different distances between the lens and paper, with and without my glasses, and since the app did not work I am unable to say that it was solely due to my own eyesight.
I, did, however, have much more fun just looking at the layered images as a whole without the glasses and looking at the "image key" to pick out images that way. The layered images look like a beautiful, trippy collage. I will still be giving the other books in this series a try, but I am kind of bummed that this was the one I was most excited about and it was a challenging experience due to the lenses.
Note: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley. I was not compensated in any other fashion for the review and the opinions reflected below are entirely my own. Special thanks to the publisher and author for providing the copy. Let me be the first to apologize for taking ages to get around to reviewing this book even though I received it before it was published. I am a bad little bean.
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