When you marvel at the extraordinary colours of a Kimberley landscape in remote Western Australia, are your eyes playing tricks or is the colour richer and more vibrant?

That is what city-based vet Gary Beilby wondered after visiting the Kimberley region.

What he saw defied his understanding because the colours looked like someone had turned the dial up to 11.

"The sky looks bluer and the ground looks redder and the ocean looks more intensely coloured," Dr Beilby said.

"Everything just seems so rich and vibrant when you compare it to just about anywhere else in the world."

But how could red and blue become more vivid in remote Australia?

Dr Beilby turned to Curious Kimberley, where the ABC investigates questions from our audience.

"I'm very curious about the remarkably intense environmental colours that you see across many areas in the north-west," he said.

Locals enjoy fishing in Broome's Roebuck Bay, but visitors often come away wondering how the bay can be so blue, and the colours of the land so strong. ( ABC Kimberley: Robert Mailer )

Are we seeing things?

Colour is just our eyes' way of discerning different frequencies of light, so why do we even see red and blue as an appealing colour contrast?

"It's occurred to me that perhaps some of it is almost like a psychological effect," Dr Beilby said.

"With blue and red being contrasting colours, perhaps that just allows our minds to see everything looking richer."

How and why we perceive colours the way we do has been a research focus for University of New South Wales psychology professor Branka Spehar.

She understands that our senses adapt to our prevailing environment, so how our eyes perceive a landscape depends on what we are used to.

"In an urban environment we have much more air pollution. We have a more restricted colour palette that our visual system is exposed to," Dr Spehar said.

When a person steps off a plane in Broome with a visual system adapted to an urban landscape, the red dirt and azure sea sends their colour perception off the scale.

Dr Spehar said the values people gave to vibrantly coloured natural landscapes were shaped by their culture and the way they regarded the natural environment, as well as the way vision had evolved.

"Our visual systems have evolved in a natural environment, for example a natural environment in Broome," Dr Spehar said.

"Colour is one of the properties of the environment, and perception of that has helped us survive."

Wet season clouds around Broome can be such wild colours that they are hard to believe, even when you are looking at the real thing. ( Source: Pamela Jennings )

It really is more colourful up north

There is more to the stunning landscapes of the Kimberley than a perception that the colours are more intense.

Martine Perret has photographed landscapes around the world for the United Nations for a decade.

She has also spent the past five years creating a spectacular book of aerial landscape shots around Western Australia.

Ms Perret said in all her photographic travels, she had rarely seen the intensity of colour found in north-west Australia, with a few exceptions.

"I flew above the Western Sahara during my work as a peacekeeping mission photographer, and you have some roughly similar places in terms of vibrancy," she said.

"But I would be in other places like Burundi in Eastern Africa, and that's not the same at all; the colours are more flat because the light is very different."

Her perspective on landscape vibrancy around the world has led Ms Perret to the conclusion that north-west Australia has a unique combination of light, land and air that produces some of the most intense natural colours globally.

"We are very lucky to live in this part of the world where we can actually witness that interaction of the reflection of the minerals and the sun, and low pollution and beautiful air quality," she said.

Martine Perret has photographed landscapes around the world, including the tidal waters of Broome's Roebuck Bay, which take on an electric blue colour. ( Supplied: Martine Perret )

From the ground up

Ian Tyler spent 10 years mapping the geology of the Kimberley as a field geologist, and is now the director of geoscience at the Geological Survey of Western Australia.

Poring over the rocks and sediments that make up the striking landscape has left him with no doubt that the colour intensity is second to none.

"The intensity of the sunlight accentuates the contrasts between different colour," Dr Tyler said.

"There are different rock types there that have different basic colours, and I also think it is the reflectivity of the rocks. They reflect the light in a way that actually intensifies the contrast between the rock types.

"The brilliant blue of the sea along the Kimberley coastline is also produced by that striking combination of intense tropical sunlight and dazzling geology.

"There's a lot of white sand on the sea floor, so that gives you a very blue colouration to the sea."

The Cockburn Range reflects the burnt orange sunlight, contrasting with the brilliantly blue sky over the Gibb River Road in the east Kimberley. ( ABC Open contributor Eastkimberley )

In muddy areas the Kimberley's huge tides mix the sediments through the water, creating an opaque but brilliantly blue effect as if the sea is azure paint.

But while most of us see a beautifully coloured landscape, Dr Tyler sees a story that is billions of years old.

"So often you're driving through the beautiful black, red soils, and above you you will see an escarpment of white to orange sandstone, so you get this contrast in colour in the way the landscape is made up," he said.

"The reddy-black soils are a breakdown of a particular sort of rock type that's full of iron, and full of magnesium

"You're reading the landscape, so you're reading the geological structure."