How Your Favorite Camo Shirt Works

While many may associate camouflage with the military, if you’ve ever been hunting or played airsoft or paintball, you’re no doubt familiar with it.

Some even wear camo shirts and shorts as a fashion statement or accessory, but make no mistake about it, the chief purpose here is function and not form.

But how does a camo shirt work, really? Let’s break it down..

The Fundamentals of Camouflage

Camouflage is, fundamentally, a set of patterns and colors that help disguise an object’s or animal’s appearance, usually with the intent to help it blend in with a background or to conceal its movements.

At its most basic level, camouflage exploits the fact that there is a massive amount of data loss when a human processes an image visually, taking advantage of the weak points in data analysis.

In layman’s terms, camouflage makes it hard for the viewer to tell what he or she is looking at, through a combination of colors and patterns.

A camouflage pattern can be used to reduce the apparent nature of surfaces, edges, parts of the body, and collectively, whole features or entire objects.

Camouflage also plays with SNR, or signal to noise ratio, wherein signal refers to the amount of useful information being transmitted and noise refers to the amount of useless or interfering information.

Effective camouflage does two things: it minimizes signal by breaking up edges or concealing salient features, and it also introduces additional noise in the form of false edges or patterns that confound the viewer.

Another technique of camouflage is “background matching” in which the camouflage pattern attempts to capture the visual impression of the background by replicating its predominant color and introducing primitive features (shapes and elements) that correspond to it.

Another key element of camouflage is to obstruct the ability of a viewer to detect a noticeable true outline. Camouflage can utilize stripes, shapes, or false features to make it appear as though there is an edge where there is not, while simultaneously obscuring the object’s true edge.

Since determining edges and surfaces is central to visual perception and recognition, this is one of the most important features of camouflage.

Another fundamental facet of camouflage patterns (in most instances) is the presence of both “macros” and “micros” in the pattern.

Macro elements are the large shapes and elements that appear in a camouflage pattern, whereas micro elements are the smaller ones, which may be nested in the larger ones or scattered across the background.

The macro elements are the chief ones that help break up a wearer’s outline at a distance and the micro elements add detail to the pattern. Up close, the micros help conceal the wearer; further away, macro elements are more essential. These two work together to increase signal to noise ratio, concealing the wearer.

Top Camo Patterns

There is a wide range of highly popular camo patterns on the market today, including but not limited to:

• US Woodland
• Tigerstripe Camo
• Multicam
• Realtree X-tra
• Realtree Max-5
• Realtree Timber
• Mossy Oak Bottomland
• Mossy Oak Shadow Grass Blades
• Mossy Oak Obsession
• Kryptek

All of which are specifically designed for utility in different disciplines, and for enhanced concealment in a wide range of different environments.

In the Market for a New Camo Shirt?

Who knew that your favorite camo shirt was working so hard to keep you concealed? Either way, if you’re looking for a new one, make sure to match the predominant color scheme to the background of the environment in which you will be using it. There are a lot of camo patterns out there and many are specialized to specific uses or disciplines.

If you’re looking for a new camo shirt, check out Fatigues Army Navy online. They carry a wide range of outdoor gear (and plenty of camo patterns) along with military surplus and equipment for hiking, camping, MilSim, paintball, airsoft, hunting, and so much more.