I’ve always assumed I have no problems with my eyesight colour-discrimination wise (short-sighted as a bat until I had lasers fired at my eyes though!) but an event today made me wonder.
When I was growing up my mum would occassionally correct me when I described certain colours as blue or green insisting they were the opposite, I always thought she was just winding me up.
Anyway today I was labelling an item of clothing at work when a colleague took exception to the description, I had labelled it as blue when she insisted it was green (or vice versa, can’t recall which way around it was!). Again suspecting she was winding me up and to settle the argument I took it to the boss and asked what colour it was, he confirmed it was in fact green!
Is there such a thing as mild blue/green colour-blindness or am I just going insane (always a distinct possibility). It certainly has no effect on my day to day life except to make me more suspicious of my fellow humans…
This isn’t “color blindness” - it’s a subjective disagreement over the terminology to be used for certain shades. My color vision is perfectly good, as per color blindness tests. It doesn’t mean that I cannot disagree with somebody else with perfectly good color vision as to whether a particular greenish-blue (or blueish-green) object is best described as “blue” or “green”. This is why we invented the word “cyan”.
Why do you think your situation is “mild”. If you are confusing blue and green, two colors that are not very similar, then maybe you’re just regular old b-g color blind.
There is no such thing as blue-green colorblind. Roughly speaking, there is red-green (2 types) and blue-yellow (very rare). Again rough names and some rare folks can’t see color at all. I cannot see what the OP sees but I agree with yabob that it’s more likely an issue of color naming. Blue-green is one of the most commonly ambiguous areas.
I can’t tell the difference between some shades of blue and purple. My kid asked me to bring her out a blue shirt from her closet, and when I did, she told me I grabbed a purple shirt. I thought it might be a color-naming thing, but then my kid brought me a pile of blue shirts and asked me which ones were purple, and to me, none were even close. The ones she pointed out as purple looked *exactly *the same shade of blue to me as the others. The rest of the family confirmed to me that I was the odd man out.
I have trouble with blue/green and with brown/purple. I wouldn’t describe it as colour blindness, though. As posted above, true colour blindness is of two varieties, neither of which apply to me.
I can much better (although not infallibly) tell the difference between blue/green and brown/purple if I’m in natural daylight. My colour discrimination is crap under artificial light.
I think what the OP is looking for is deuteranomalous trichomacy, which can lead to some issues discriminating some shades of green from other colors. It is neither confusion in color terminology nor an inability to see certain colors. It does mean the person’s color vision differs from the norm. It’s rare in that people with anomalous color perception are a minority, it’s not rare in that is found 6% of males and 0.04% of females, making it the most common form of colorblindness.
Colorblindness actually occurs in more than two forms, even when you exclude the anomalous trichromacies. It’s just that outside of the two most common forms the others are exceedingly rare.
While it’s usually called blue-yellow color blindness, blue-gree color blindness is actually probably a better layman’s description of it at least in some cases. It results from missing or “shifted” short wavelength sensitive cones. It is much rarer than red-green color blindness (less than 1 in 10 thousand), and unlike red-green color blindness, it is not sex-linked affecting men and women equally.
I do not say these are not worth trying, but color discrimination tests taken online cannot be completely reliable because of limitations and variations in the abilities of monitors to reproduce colors accurately.
Youmght not like to admit it, but it certainly sounds like (one of teh several forms of) colorblindness to me.
This is a critical point, and is possibly even more important for the OP’s specific vision question. The manner in which monitors reproduce colours makes assumptions about the response of the receptors in the viewer’s eye. Most monitors actually emit a mess of line spectra (CRT phosphors are very carefully specified, and their precise emission lives with us in the various colour gamut standards, and LCDs are backlit with either florescent or white LED sources, both of which contain line emitters - and if you are lucky gets you much the same gamut as the CRT based standards.) Because of this, colour vision defects that result from shifted sensitivity violate the colour generation assumptions of the display.
There are an infinite number of ways you can synthesise most colours in the human gamut from three light sources, simply by changing the spectral output of the sources, and then changing the relative brightness of the sources. People with colour vision defects will not always see the same colours when such twiddling is done as a person with nominally normal vision. This is part of why the OP sees shirts with different colours as the same.
An on-line test that says you have a colour vision issue is probably right, but one that says you don’t may be a false negative. Proper test materials are very carefully printed with precise paper and ink combinations and are designed for specific controlled lighting conditions, just so that the final spectral content of the light is controlled.
This is a good test. While color monitors can be off, this test would mostly correct for it because you’re comparing relative amount of colors. One block is more blue-er than the other and the overwhelming majority of monitors would display the blue-er block as blue-er even though the amount of blue would vary from monitor to monitor.
What might be a problem with the OP is the lighting in the building. There’s a vast difference of color under warm lighting (yellow-ish) versus cool lighting (blue-ish). Normally, our eyes correct for that. The OP’s eyes may not be making that correction. A blue object under yellow light is green-ish when measured by objective color measuring devices. A green object under cool lighting will be more blue-ish.
I have to get tested. I have a decreased sensitivity to blue. I can see blue, but anything that’s blue-green will look clearly green to me, and all blues seems somewhat grayish. It could be tritanomaly, but without real testing I don’t know. One form of this type of colorblindness is not inherited, and I’ve seen that a blow to the head can be the cause, however my father also had some form of color blindness in the blue green area, something my mother decided to tell me about after he had passed away, so it’s not much help in diagnosing me since he never saw a doctor about it (possibly the only thing he never saw a doctor about, he was quite a hypochondriac).
These don’t seem to work very well on a monitor. Using these tests on paper I am textbook red-green blind but at that site I cannot see a number in most of the tests. YMMV.
If you must do it online, use a CRT, not LCD. Ideally, maybe your library or somewhere has Ishihara plates.
Forms of red-green colorblindness (protan/deutan and anomaly) are unlikely to have discrimination difficulties with green/blue. Tritan is possible, they will both seem similar but the green, depending on shade, may seem brighter.
