It’s the difference between a quality black and white photo and a one that has too little contrast. Don’t you wonder what the fall trees really look like?
Yes. A million times yes. I’m only very slightly color-blind, but I just played a massive game of capture the flag friday night, and was unable to distinguish between the pastel orange and pastel green headbands.
I’ve asked my SO this in the past. If all 3 bulbs were to be lit at the same time, he can ID the green, but the red appears as a darker shade of the yellow. He pays a lot of attention to what the other traffic does, and clues like what pedestrian lights are showing.
The ones that get him are the single flashing light, yellow for caution, red for stop. These are usually at intersections with little traffic. He pretty much can’t tell which it is, so tends to error on the side of caution, and stop at all of them.
About a hundred years ago (maybe not quite so long ago) I read an article in Omni magazine (I think) about a scientist who was developing a contact lens to correct for various types of color blindness. It was still in development, but I looked forward to the day that my curiosity could finally be satisfied. As I recall, I would need to be “fitted” for it by accurately testing my type and level of color-blindness and would only need one lens (because color perception can be had using just one eye).
Many years later (a few years ago), I asked an optometrist if he knew whatever became of the research. He didn’t seem to know of the work, but speculated that it shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish albeit very, very expensively; guessing a couple of thousand dollars at least. Since I was never more than idly curious, I let the matter drop.
Broomstick, it sounds like we have similar experiences (I’ve never needed or cared enough to actually be tested). I can see the red of the stop sign. I can see the green of the bush. But if you put the sign in front of the bush, I better be paying attention or I won’t notice it (without the bright, white, reflective word “STOP”). The green traffic light looks blue, but not the same blue as an actual blue light. The amber and red lights look much closer to the same color, but distinguishable. I can’t imagine my vision causing any kind of problem with flying a plane (which I have done with my father, but not since I was a kid.)
So, yeah. Cheap and reversible? I’d give it a shot. but I suspect I’d want it changed back after my curiosity was satisfied.
I am a little curious as to what the world would look like with normal color vision, but I don’t feel like I’m losing out on anything - sunsets still look beautiful to me.
In fact I never knew I was a bit different until I went for my driver’s license and I had to look down a scope and identify the three colors, which I couldn’t really do properly but they let me through anyway. Then, years later at university when we were doing a genetics prac we tested each other with those colored disks with hidden numbers in them. I got every single answer consistent with red/green color blindness. That’s when I realized I was color blind, not “just a bit weak with colors” like I thought after having done my drivers test.
Then here in Japan when I went for my boat operator’s license I had the color test which I failed again, miserably, and the doctor wouldn’t clear me for a license. So I had to go to a specialist, who gave me a different kind of test. This one was a new one for me - there were about 15 or 16 small pegs of different colors across the spectrum and you have to sort them in gradation from one end of the spectrum to the other - this I could do, I could identify the very subtle hue changes in correct order with relative ease. So I got the all clear in the end.
As I have normal vision in the red-yellow-orange part of the spectrum I do, in fact, know what fall trees really look like. I do NOT see the world in black and white (I don’t have acrhomotopsia). I do, in fact, see green, I just don’t see it as well as you do, it’s not some unknown feature of the world.
Adjust your video screen so there is less green saturation in the picture, but the really vivid greens are still visible as green. THAT is my world, not the colorless place you apparently imagine it to be.
As an artist, of sorts, I am disappointed that my colourblindness interferes with my ability to adjust colours.
But I don’t think being correctly calibrated would make much difference in the end, as I am inherently bad at anything to do with colour by default anyway. Assuming that has nothing to do with my colourblindness, which, I admit, I’m not certain of.
Sounds like a Roth color test, though 16 colors is a simple version. I work in ophthalmology research and gave a 64-color version of the test to someone who must have had a very dramatic form of colorblindness. You’re supposed to arrange them in a rainbow-hue circle, moving from reds through orange, yellow, etc, coming around to purple and meeting up with purple-red hues where you started. (You can put them together in any order, but the “starting” chip that’s put out for you is a mauve color, aka a purple-rose hue.) He arranged the color chips in an order that made no apparent sense, even trying to figure out color substitutions. It took me a few appointments where he did this before I figured out that perhaps he was arranging them by how “luminous” they were.
Judging by how most people in ophthalmology clinics react to the concept of an injection into the eyeball, I would have guessed that would be the primary discouragement to get the treatment.
Oh yeah, me too. And a quick google tells me it seems to be available. But (and of course there’s a but) it looks like it’s more trouble than it’s worth except in a few specific situations. Shame.