(Disclaimer: I am not an astronomer) As you may be aware, all digital images are composed of a color palette applied to monochrome images, it just so happens t

(Disclaimer: I am not an astronomer) As you may be aware, all digital images are composed of a color palette applied to monochrome images, it just so happens that we usually pick a color palette of red, green, and blue, which ideally correspond as closely as possible to the three wavelengths of light to which the imaging sensors in our cameras (and also our eyes) are sensitive, thus reproducing what our eyes would see in person. In the case of JWST, mid- and far-infrared sensors were chosen for several reasons, the first being that due to the accelerating expansion of the universe, light from further away (equivalently, light from further back in time) has been stretched out along its path of travel, causing its wavelength to be shifted further into the infrared spectrum. Another possible reason is that infrared wavelengths penetrate the interstellar dust clouds much better than visible or ultraviolet light, allowing us to see stars and galaxies that were previously hidden by dust. Since JWST captures wavelengths of light that we can't see, we have to apply some sort of visible-light palette to the monochrome images it sends back. At the bottom of this image, you can see which wavelengths were mapped to which visible-light colors: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7N9A6934R1WRWBJY1ZXB98B.png https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01G7N9A6934R1WRWBJY1ZXB98B.png One key aspect of this mapping is that the order of wavelengths has been preserved; shorter IR wavelengths are colored blue while longer ones are colored red. It's likely that this mapping is non-linear though, so the relative distances between IR wavelengths are not the same as the distances between the hues in the image, and this mapping was chosen to maximize the visible detail in the resulting image, as well as to highlight scientifically relevant information such as dust clouds and areas of star formation, so it's not totally arbitrary. In addition, the dynamic range of JWST is much much larger than the pixels in any display. The raw data values probably range from 0 to some hundreds of thousands, while your display's pixel brightness can only go from 0 to 255 (or maybe 1023, if you have a 10-bit HDR display). While we could simply map the maximum pixel value to 255 and compress everything else in between, this would lose nearly all of the detail present in the darker regions of the images, compressing them to 0. Instead, a non-linear brightness mapping is applied, to best represent all the information present in darker regions without blowing out the bright stars and galaxies. So to answer your questions, the colors shown in the images are not what you would see in person. Without any enhancements you probably wouldn't be able to see much if any of the dust clouds, and many of the redder galaxies would not be visible to you at all, while all the rest would be different hues than the ones shown (probably mostly whites, yellows, and reds).