visible light - What "happens" to the energy of a photon after it is absorbed?

The simple model of the colour of reflected light from objects (yes, colour perception is a function of the eye/brain) as I understand it is:

Firstly I will write what I understand happens - which may be the source of my misunderstanding.

Consider white light incident on a material.

1. 
   

   Photons of particular wavelength can be absorbed by an atom by causing an electron to jump from its "base" state to some higher energy level.

   
   


2. 
   

   If the remainder of the incident light is reflected or transmitted the colour of the material is whatever the eye/brain perceives to be the colour of white light less the frequencies absorbed.

   
   


3. 
   

   The material must absorb a range of frequencies otherwise all colours of reflected/transmitted light would appear white until observed through a spectroscope which would indicate individual frequencies missing from the white light spectrum - which would be too little of the whole spectrum to notice.

   
   

Which leads to my actual question ....

If an electron has been "excited" by absorbing a photon from the incident light, surely at some moment later in time it will fall to a lower energy level and re-emit the original frequency absorbed? Hence there will be no "missing" frequencies from the reflected / transmitted light and every object will appear to be white? (but of course this does not happen).

Answer

If you are considering a single isolated atom then it's true that the atom has no way of getting rid of the energy from the photon except by emitting another photon. However as soon as the atom is surrounded by other atoms there are various mechanisms for radiationless decay i.e. transferring the energy of the absorbed photon into channels that don't involve reradiating the photon.

In a gas the excited atom or molecule can collide with another atom/molecule and transfer the excitation energy into kinetic energy. This is known as collisional de-excitation (that Wikipedia article is for collisional excitation, but de-excitation is the same process in reverse).

In a solid the energy can be transferred to lattice vibrations, i.e, heat, which is generally known as quenching. In fact in most solids quenching is so efficient that almost no energy is reradiated as photons. Reradiation in fluorescence or phosphorescence is the exception rather than the norm.