My understanding of canine vision is that they aren’t completely color blind as I was taught when I was a child. Instead the latest research indicates that they have a muted sense of color, apparently they can see blues and yellows, but can’t see red. I can somewhat confirm this when I let them chase a laser pointer - they can see it fine on a patio, but when I move it to the grass they no longer see the red dot on the green background. Is there a website where I can upload a picture and have it converted to the color palette we think dogs see in? I know it wouldn’t be perfect but it would be very interesting to get an idea of how the world around us might look to my furry buddies.
Look for “Deuteranopia”, the form of human colorblindness similar to the dichromatic vision found in most mammals. Several sites show examples, or provide tools for modifying images. Often, these are sites intended to allow web designers to test their sites for usability by color blind people. One such:
And one of many example pictures you can turn up:
Probably a somewhat better example:
http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/pace/VA-Lab/colourperceptionweb/deterannormal.jpg
Poke around - you’ll find more.
Very cool - thanks Yabob! I like the picture showing the child to see how our skin would look - without the reds they probably see me as somewhat corpse like! It also seems to be difficult to tell the difference between green grass in the summer and yellow in winter. All in all though, what they see isn’t too different, just muted.
Keep in mind that you can’t know what they see. You don’t appear corpselike to dogs or deuteranopes because they have no other frame of reference; your skin simply looks normal. With the more subtle forms of colorblindness, the individual can even be unaware that they have a deficit, although most who have only two cones will realize early that something is up when their color matching is different from trichromats who have normal color vision.
Dog vision is also fuzzier than ours. Upon googling I see this appears to be a side effect of the “tapetum” that gives their eyes that red glow in photos and improves their night vision.
One of my students is colorblind, and he was having a lot of trouble in class yesterday, as we were working with a color-coded periodic table of the elements. I assigned a student to be his “seeing-eye dog” for the time being. 
That’s probably not the only reason, but the most significant one. I have seen estimates in the range of 20/50 to 20/90 for dog vision, with cats perhaps slightly worse at the higher end of that range.
Dogs eyes are generally wider set than humans, also, although not as wide set as some prey animals like rabbits. They have better peripheral vision than we do, but not as wide a field of binocular vision. Some sources claim that their depth perception isn’t very good except directly in front of them.
I have mild red/green color blindness. None of those examples exactly mimics my level.
First site, three Earths look probably just like what you see - the first has green South America, the second has all the green shifted brown, the third is basically gray with a pink stripe.
The interesting one is the third set, the color blindness chart. I can definitely see a difference between the two charts. The second is basically all shades of green. The first has some reddish pink in the browns. However, I cannot clearly see the 3 in that image. I can sort of make out the bottom curve, but the top is just a smear of greens, reds, and browns.
In the kids picture I see a distinct difference from the original.
I have only had a few real life situations where it has come up. Primarily with some dark greens looking black to me.
Just for one perspective.
The 3 is hard to see for anyone. I am not going to diagnose you over the internet, but it might be something like deuteranomaly, which 5-8% of males have. Here, you aren’t missing a cone, but instead one of your cones is more similar to another than in people with normal color vision.
Severe red/green color blindness here. The color blindness charts both look identical to me, and I don’t see any indication at all of a number being there. The pic of the hats all look identical to me, as well as the two of the hot air balloons.
My Dad is Red Green color blind as well (though I don’t know why type he is diagnosed). He tells a story about when he first discovered that he as color blind, he was a kid in the 50’s playing a game of I Spy - he saw a red piece of paper of a power line that was actually green. One his teacher realized he was mistaken about the color she promptly took him to the school nurse to be tested. He tells us now that the only way he can tell the difference between a stop light and a go light is by the position, he can’t tell a differnce in colors. To you guys that are color blind, does red stand out to you at all? Do you see why it’s such a harsh color or does it just seem mundane to you?
Just out of curiosity, what do the tritanope pictures look like to you? If I take the tritanope picture of the balloons, and run it through the deutoranope filter at vischeck, I wind up with a mostly black and white photograph with only yellow shades left, which makes sense.
Tritanope balloons (which to normal sight features a green sky):
http://www.psych.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/colourperceptionweb/tritannormal.jpg
And what kind of color system would dogs invent if they built monitors? Presumably it would have two parameters, but primary color choices are actually somewhat arbitrary, and I doubt they would choose either red or green. Cyan / Yellow?
Red/green color blindness means you don’t see the red, or you may see it, but it’ll be muted. I got pulled over once on a military base because I ran through a flashing red light when I thought it was a flashing yellow (single light - not the stack).
Primary colors cause a problem, but it’s the secondary colors that are really bad for me. If someone holds up a navy blue shirt and a purple shirt next to it they look the same to me, because I don’t see the red in the purple. I’ve purchased pink paint thinking it was gray, and don’t get me started on some of the color combinations I’ve worn to the office.
This might be a better example: http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm
On the first test plate, I see the number that it says everyone should be able to see. After that I don’t see any numbers, just a bunch of dots. Now the dots have color, they’re not all shades of gray (like in the second plate I see green, orange, gray, etc.) but I don’t see any numbers in them.
To be clear, I have an comprehension of orange, red, purple, pink, etc., I just see them differently than “normal” people. Some think that if I’m red/green color blind, when I see say, the American flag, instead of seeing red, white, and blue, I see gray, white, and blue. That’s not the case. I see white, blue, and a color I intertpret as red, though it may be orange or brown to you.
Hope that helps. It’s hard to explain, because I’ve never seen things any other way.
Here is a RGB gamut. The large horseshoe represents the range of possible colors, while the smaller triangle represents what a theoretical RGB monitor can display. Yes, the range of colors a monitor can show is rather crippled.
These lines represent colors that would be confused by a human deuteranope, or roughly what a dog would confuse. If a dog were to design a monitor, it would need to maximize the differences along the direction orthogonal to the lines. Keep in mind that luminance also allows discrimination, so along the second to bottom line, that doesn’t mean that dogs can never tell pinkish and blue-cyan apart.
