Our findings and the elucidated mechanism are not only of fundamental significance, but also hold great potential for further technological advancements in industrial processes such as additive manufacturing, photochemical therapeutics, large scale industrial photochemistry, quantum sensing, and precision photochemistry. The understanding of the microenvironment effect causing the fundamental mismatch between wavelength resolved photochemical reactivity and absorbance that has been presented herein will allow using light as a tool to modulate the effect and to tune systems by simply exchanging the solvent environment employed, and perhaps even forcing desired microenvironments through external means.