Seems to be, yes.
Did you see my post #15. I think that could be the basis of a plausible explanation.
I’m another one who has always had this, and just assumed it was normal. I’ve only noticed it while lying on my side, and attributed it to the lower eye getting less light, and therefor having a wider aperture.
It happens to me sometimes when one of my eyes (one side of my body) is more in the sunlight than the other eye/body side.
I don’t know if a lateral difference is ever found, but some people (mostly women) have four sorts of cone, see four primary colors, and find all sorts of color photography and video seriously defective.
I would like to chime in again with some thoughts and experiences.
The effect is definitely amplified if I lay on one side, and then sit upright and look at something white (could be a computer screen, a sheet of paper, or whatever). However, even now I can still see the effect, and it is always always always red for my right eye, blue for my left eye.
I can say for sure that it’s not color blindness. I’ve taken that online color hue arrangement test several times on several different monitors and computers, and surprisingly, I’ve always gotten a 7 on it (0 is perfect hue distinction, but 7 is pretty dang normal/good, a color blind person will score in the hundreds). However, I’ve never done the test with one eye closed and then tried it with the other eye closed. I think I may try this when I get the chance. It is very possible that one of my eyes doesn’t have as good of hue distinction as the other (I imagine it would be my right eye, as it seems more “wrong” than my left eye).
So, it’s not just laying down or having one eye exposed to light for a while that causes this phenomenon for me, but those definitely do amplify it.
And thanks for tackling my question, Cecil!
[QUOTE=AaronX;17421001 that’s been linked to a higher heart attack risk[/QUOTE]
Yeah but. The difference is minor and I’ve been carefully examined by a cardiologist. Nothing to worry about. The only people excited were the GPs
Ok phew. Glad you don’t have any problems.
Love this topic. Some interesting anecdotes and some actual expertise thrown randomly into the mix…
I have perfect color vision - rare for a male. I work with color for my career and have been tested professionally more than once. I do lighting design for the stage and screen and I have done years of color correcting for video and professional photography. As such I’m quite attuned to color differences and fine changes in color. And the comment about affecting life other than ‘professional purposes’ in the first thread made me notice because of course this is one of those professional fields where color balance in your eyes is actually vital.
Your brain automatically white balances. If you ever take photos without changing settings or film and don’t correct for the white balance, you’ll see that the amount of red, blue, and green under different lighting is dramatically different, from a cloudy day to a sunny one, from daylight to fluorescent to tungsten lighting. We usually don’t notice this, (although we can see hints if we’re indoors under incandescent lighting and happen to look through a distant window at the daylight outside) and I think in most cases, most people don’t have a differentiation in perceived color between their eyes. But our brain is color-correcting because it knows what color things should be, and it adjusts accordingly, much faster than the camera does.
I don’t USUALLY notice a difference between my eyes - they’re usually calibrated the same. I can tweak it by rubbing an eye, keeping one closed for a while or exposing them to different light sources for some time. But generally, my eyes perceive color identically, or have a (random) slight difference in blue/red hue by only a minute, almost imperceptible amount.
So, when working in a photo lab for hours and hours adjusting photos to within minute tolerances on color correction, you have to occasionally take breaks. Your eyes get worn out and the very specifically controlled lighting ceases to be so effective at giving you a good reference. When I would spend long shifts with minimal breaks at the color-correcting machine in the lab, I could get screwed up if I did too many dozens of photos in a row with heavy amounts of one color - such as high school senior photos where the same blue backdrop was in every shot, or tons of photos in the woods where dark green dominated. At those times, I would walk outside into the sunlight and it would take 10 minutes before things would look right again - after staring at the woods for hours I’d walk into the sunlight and the white wall would appear magenta, for instance. This always seemed to correct after a few minutes, but it would give me a headache while it happened.
There was a movie that came out when I was just out of college, Spy Kids 3D. It was one of the last films to show in theatres using Red/Blue 3D glasses as opposed to polarized light 3d glasses. I went and saw the film. I had an enormous headache watching it (as I typically do watching any 3d films) and also had less and less ability to see a 3d effect as the film progressed- it started to look more and more like what it looks like when you take off the glasses. When I came out of the theatre I realized my color vision was out of whack. My eye which had been behind a red lens for 90 minutes was now shifted to see everything in a much cooler state - everything looked cyan-shifted. The eye behind a blue lens for 90 minutes was shifted the opposite direction, and everything looked reddish. I was entertained by this for a while, closing one eye and then the other and comparing.
It got scary (remember my career at this point was intimately tied to adjusting the color of lighting) when I got up the next morning and I still had the same problem. It did subside of course, but it took about 2 weeks, during which I was about 10x slower at getting the color correction done as I couldn’t trust my eyes very well, and it affected my job performance; fortunately this was a slow part of the season and the work load wasn’t too much for the other color-timing staff to cover most of it.
Anyway, years later and though I don’t do color correction daily anymore, I’ve only experienced minor shifts now and then ever since - one degree of deviation on the color vision tests is about the difference I ever notice. I’ve not found that the blue/red shift in my eyes when it occurs is consistent - in my case at least it’s either due to outside impact or is just random. So for Drew, I don’t know if my experience is similar enough to help, but I don’t think I’d be worried, so long as it doesn’t bug you too much and drive you crazy walking around winking everywhere.
Congrats, drew for being chosen by the Master. Put it in your resume or CV. 
If you were to spend a good deal of time (maybe a couple minutes to an hour?) doing normal business with the dominant eye covered, would the difference be as striking if you tested both eyes again immediately afterwards? I’m not sure if amblyopia caused by strabismus affects the perceived brightness, but I’m curious.
The only way a male could is if he were XXY (Klinefelter) or something similar, and inherited the right cone opsin combination. I think it’s premature to say that tetrachromacy is the main reason that women disagree with males on color choices!
This is actually the 2nd time that Cecil has answered one of my questions. A year or so ago, he answered a question about the reliability of Wikipedia, which was a question I had asked him. He ended up using someone else’s letter as it was worded more succinctly (and probably came before mine too), but I still got an email from Dex saying that Cecil had answered my question (even though he chose to frame it in response to someone else’s letter).
But yeah, never would have thought that the old thread about seeing different colors in different eyes would have ever been answered by The Master. Very cool. And it was a very interesting article that taught me a number of new things. I’ll try not to let the fame and fortune go to my head.
That depends on the mechanism in question. Wikipedia indicates that there is a study that suggests as many as 8% of men might have four cone pigments. (That doesn’t necessarily translate to true tetrachromacy, though; the article is ambiguous on that.) If that’s true, then there must be another mechanism at work besides the sex chromosomes.
Powers &8^]
I would not advise trusting an online colorblindness test. They produce false positives because computer monitors can’t show the full range of colors and vary too much. Especially avoid both online and physical versions of the Ishihara test (circles made from colored dots). It was only meant for basic screening and can’t give more than a yes or no answer, which the writer already knows. If they want a detailed result they should see a professional and get either the Farnsworth 100 (not the 15) or an anomaloscope test. Matching the lights on an anomaloscope is the gold standard test for color vision.
MODERATOR COMMENT:
R. Moribayashi, since there was already a thread on this topic, I’ve merged your comment into that thread. OK?
This is correct, if you are catatract age. Everything seemed slight darker, by a shade of beige or tan, in one than the other, because my cataract in one had progressed more than the other. Cataracts darken the field of view somewhat. Now that I’ve had cataract surgery on both eyes, I no longer see a difference from one eye to the other.