Do we all See Color the Same?

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I finally reached the pointr with my vision where I had cataract surgery. Its a quick and minor surgery, removing your natural lens from the eye and putting in a artificial one.

What I did not expect was to see different colors in my repaired eye. I asked my wife about it, since she had the same surgery last year, and she confirmed it. Then, I asked the Doctor this morning when I went back for a check. He said that it happens, and that my brain will adjust.

After thinking about it, it seems that my cloudy lens may have been filtering out blue and red light to produce a more yellow -green tone.

This made me wonder just how accurate my editing of color images has been. I've been reconsidering getting a color calibrator. I have not scored well on the color vision tests, so I'm thinking the cataracts could have something to do with that.

Has anyone else had the same experience?

 

[dcm]

Nope - we don't always see color the same. I suffer from a different problem, red dichromacy (protanopia). The red cones in my eyes are much less sensitive than the blue and green cones. Others may have a green or blue dichromacy. So I have a similar experience - on web pages, presentations, and photos.

For instance, I can barely make out the red text on the dark background in the header and footer of this web site. There is not enough contrast between the colors. If all of the contrast is one RGB color (red in this case), it is very hard for me to distinguish. The background color is RGB 31,31,31 and the anti-aliased text ranges from 152,0,0, to 152,31,31. It's never a good idea to vary only one color value on web pages and presentations. The gray "Hello" is easy to see - its 152,152,152. This is a good practice in text, particularly anti aliased text. Larger, bolder fonts can also help since the antialiasing has less of an effect. The red logo at 219,31,39 is much easier for me to distinguish since there is a greater red contrast and a larger patch of color that isn't antialiased to blend. A good way to check web pages and presentations is to print them monochrome. The lack of contrast can really stand out.

In photos on a screen or printed it also causes confusion with colors. Red+Green is Yellow but it still looks green to me. Red+Blue is Violet but it still looks blue to me. Red+Blue+Green is White but I can't tell that from Cyan. I use a ColorMunki Display to calibrate my monitors and tend to do minimum color adjustment in my photos. If I do, I have my wife review it. She's an artist with a good eye for color and appreciates having accurate screen colors rather than the garish adjustments I originally made to the monitor so I could see reds better.

Edit: Added a screen capture and adjusted only the red levels as a crude approximation of the screen that I see. You'll notice you can still clearly see red, but the red text blends in a bit more.

 

[chromophore]

The natural lens in the human eye filters out long UV wavelengths that, if they were to reach the retina, would cause excitation in the violet portion of the spectrum. When the lens is replaced as in cataracts surgery with an artificial lens, the different material characteristics are such that the artificial lens lets through these additional wavelengths that would otherwise have been filtered out. This is part of the reason why you can see colors after the surgery that you could not before.

Various patients report that objects that formerly appeared black are now perceived as a shade of violet, such as black fabrics, lens caps, etc.

The visible spectrum in humans occurs at wavelengths around 390 - 700 nm. The lens in the human eye blocks UV transmission at 300-400 nm, with optical density roughly increasing with decreasing wavelength. Age of the lens also increases the density: children can perceive shorter wavelengths of light than adults or the elderly.

It is somewhat analogous to the reports of the Leica M8 sensor, for which the IR cutoff was too weak, thereby allowing some leakage of otherwise not visible portions of the EM spectrum to be registered by the imaging sensor.

Regarding your broader question of color perception, the answer is of course that some people do not have the same perceptual abilities as others, for reasons other than cataracts. The easiest example of this is color blindness (protanopia or deuteranopia), in which the retinal cells (cones) of the eye have too much overlap in their peak sensitivity to different wavelengths, resulting in poor discrimination of color in certain portions of the spectrum. Recently, a company (EnChroma) has developed a special glass that has the characteristics of a notch filter, which is intended to improve color discrimination--color-blind individuals who have tried their glasses frequently report amazing results, some immediately, and others after a period of adjustment.

It is not difficult to reason that most slight individual-to-individual variations in the cone cells may result in varying degrees of color discrimination between two people even though neither could be said to be "color-blind." Then there are reports of tetrachromats, rare individuals who supposedly have four types of cone cells rather than three, and are thus even more sensitive to variations in color than most humans.

One anecdote I can share is that I have a friend who is also a fellow photographer, and when we went to a science museum, he told me that he perceived a certain exhibit as having a blue color, whereas I firmly perceived it as green. We were both equally adamant about it. My other friend agreed with me, not him. To our collective knowledge, none of us is colorblind. On the x-rite hue discrimination test, which I have taken several times, I consistently score 0 errors each time. See how you do:

http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

What you have said is undoubtedly what I'm experiencing. The color saturation and shades are similar, but more blue and red are mow visible. I've taken color discrimination tests before and score poorly, or at least far from perfect. This is the next day following the replacement, and vision is still changing. Apparently, it took more time than expected for my eye dilation to pass, over 24 hours. During that time, I noticed lots of change as well as other phenomena.

I now see my screen as a brighter white with a very slightly blue tint, and in my unchanged eye, its slightly warm. Since I will have my other eye done on the 22nd, I'm going to struggle a bit with a computer screen, since My eye needs two weeks to settle down which is just prior to the next surgery.

 

[candyman]

I had cataract surgery on one eye a couple of years ago. As I remember I did not see /experience color difference.
But, I always wonder about the calibration of my screen. Are these colors the same as how others experience them? So, do you see the same colors of my photos as I do? I assume not because I am sure that others have set their own calibration and because of that colors may appear different. Not?

 

[kaihp]

Nope - we don't always see color the same. I suffer from a different problem, red dichromacy (protanopia). The red cones in my eyes are much less sensitive than the blue and green cones. Others may have a green or blue dichromacy. So I have a similar experience - on web pages, presentations, and photos.

For instance, I can barely make out the red text on the dark background in the header and footer of this web site.

(snip explanation)

Yup, I got the same problem. I've even had a 0/12 score on a color blindness test (although I do see colors)

 

[Maximilian]

Has anyone else had the same experience?

Luckily I still have quite good eyes and don't even need glasses, let's see how long this will stay that way...

But my parents hat the same surgery and told me about similar experiences.

Funny thing about this topic:
When I was a child I had the theory that the choice of your favorite color was comming from a different way of receiving and perceiveing the color in each individuals eye. So we would favor the same "internal" color which is different "externally". Funny that this came to my mind now reading your question.

 

[kaswindell]

Nope - we don't always see color the same. I suffer from a different problem, red dichromacy (protanopia). The red cones in my eyes are much less sensitive than the blue and green cones. Others may have a green or blue dichromacy. So I have a similar experience - on web pages, presentations, and photos.

For instance, I can barely make out the red text on the dark background in the header and footer of this web site.

(snip explanation)

Yup, I got the same problem. I've even had a 0/12 score on a color blindness test (although I do see colors)

I do too - and even though I have calibrated my (cheap) monitor with ColorMunki, I likewise am very reluctant to mess with color in Lightroom.

I scored a 49 on the x-rite test, don't bother to ask me if your socks match your shirt!

 

[Arty]

I am green weak. I discovered this year's ago. A friend was over and he commented on the green background of a painting my wife did. I insisted that it was gray. I added light with a flashlight and could then see the green.
There are large individual differences on color perception, just as there are in acuity.
I had cataract surgery on both eyes, and didn't notice any change in color.

 

[9VIII]

I'm just glad we have at least come to the point of being able to measuer colour. We know precisely what colour is, how you perceive it is your problem.
That said, how you perceive colour shouldn't affect your ability to accurately judge a photo as long as your monitor produces the same colour accurately.
If your greens are all wonky then the forest valley will be just as funky while you're standing above it as it looks on the monitor, reproducing what you saw is what matters.

 

[dcm]

Nope - we don't always see color the same. I suffer from a different problem, red dichromacy (protanopia). The red cones in my eyes are much less sensitive than the blue and green cones. Others may have a green or blue dichromacy. So I have a similar experience - on web pages, presentations, and photos.

For instance, I can barely make out the red text on the dark background in the header and footer of this web site.

(snip explanation)

Yup, I got the same problem. I've even had a 0/12 score on a color blindness test (although I do see colors)

I do too - and even though I have calibrated my (cheap) monitor with ColorMunki, I likewise am very reluctant to mess with color in Lightroom.

I scored a 49 on the x-rite test, don't bother to ask me if your socks match your shirt!

Nice to know I'm not alone. A few years ago had a professor do his entire lecture with red text on black background slides. Could not read any of them.

In LR I am okay with the gross adjustments like white balance. I just stay away from the HSL/RGB adjustments.

 

[rfdesigner]

not at all suprised, colour is subjective and just as we are all different in obvious physical traits and abilities the same should be true of all our senses.

I have particularly narrow core vision, great for night driving and means my high sensitivity peripheral vision is very close to my on axis vision, handy for astronomy. Women in my experience have larger core vision, are better at colour but less good at spotting and tracking details at distance, and pretty lousy at night vision.

Best to let us men do the night driving and let the women deal with supermarkets. Next time you see a man in a supermarket.. chances are he'll stand on the far side of each isle and scan the opposite shelves with his narrow vision, while his wife just walks stright up to what he's looking for and can't understand why he's so blind.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/

 

[rfdesigner]

I finally reached the pointr with my vision where I had cataract surgery. Its a quick and minor surgery, removing your natural lens from the eye and putting in a artificial one.

What I did not expect was to see different colors in my repaired eye. I asked my wife about it, since she had the same surgery last year, and she confirmed it. Then, I asked the Doctor this morning when I went back for a check. He said that it happens, and that my brain will adjust.

After thinking about it, it seems that my cloudy lens may have been filtering out blue and red light to produce a more yellow -green tone.

This made me wonder just how accurate my editing of color images has been. I've been reconsidering getting a color calibrator. I have not scored well on the color vision tests, so I'm thinking the cataracts could have something to do with that.

Has anyone else had the same experience?

My wife tells me Monet had cataracts and his paintings were effected by his colour bias as his eyes changed.

http://psych.ucalgary.ca/PACE/VA-Lab/AVDE-Website/Monet.html

 

[rs]

Nope - we don't always see color the same. I suffer from a different problem, red dichromacy (protanopia). The red cones in my eyes are much less sensitive than the blue and green cones. Others may have a green or blue dichromacy. So I have a similar experience - on web pages, presentations, and photos.

If the red cones in your eyes are less sensitive (or tuned into an alternate wavelength), you have protanomaly - still a trichromat (three colour vision), just not necessarily the 'standard' red which makes up normal human vision.

However, your symptoms sound identical to mine, and I have protanopia - which makes me a dichromat (two colour vision, in my case green and blue). Like you, if I stare really closely at the CR forum page, I can just make out the red writing under the 'Hello rs' text. Most of the time, even with a good look, there's nothing there.

Without the red cones working, my only way to see red is to rely on my green cones to detect the light. As each type of cone isn't set to one pure wavelength, but is more sensitive to one and able to pick up others with less sensitivity, there is overlap between the three. As a result, reds with a long wavelength (nearer to a pure orange or even yellow) are reasonably bright to the green cones, but deeper reds with a shorter wavelength can appear pretty close to pitch black to me. Hence the problem with deep red writing on a black background.

Much to her annoyance, I do rely heavily on my wife for setting WB in PP for critical work. However, I usually try to do a first sweep myself on all the images, and have found through going through this process countless times that I'm able to get things mostly spot on from image to image now.

Things have greatly improved for me since moving from LR to DPP as my camera settings of WB trimming A +3 are to our liking, and the camera seems to nail it in almost every situation (indoor tungsten shots are the exception). LR kills the cameras well chosen settings, and I was spending forever and a day going around in circles trying in vain to hone in on something which DPP simply does out of the box. I'd end up getting to a point where its not cool or warm, but it'd have a horrible almost sickening cast to it. Or just lacking in contrast/life. Nothing that tweaking settings could eradicate between the two of us. Going back to DPP with a couple of shoots I'd done with LR was like a breath of fresh air - instantly the colours were how we both remembered them, but with a clarity and tonality that completely alluded us in LR - all with nothing more than the default settings in DPP. And simple tweaks easily result in improvements from that already great baseline. You can't ask for more than that.

I'm no longer doing photography semi-professionally - my day job now demands so much overtime and fortunately rewards me nicely for it, so giving up LR and the ability to edit images from assistant photographers with Nikons etc has been no hardship. For me, DPP is now the perfect product, and I can actually enjoy photography again. More time behind the camera making the photos I want to make, and less time editing. And I get colours the way I want them to be

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

I finally reached the pointr with my vision where I had cataract surgery. Its a quick and minor surgery, removing your natural lens from the eye and putting in a artificial one.

What I did not expect was to see different colors in my repaired eye. I asked my wife about it, since she had the same surgery last year, and she confirmed it. Then, I asked the Doctor this morning when I went back for a check. He said that it happens, and that my brain will adjust.

After thinking about it, it seems that my cloudy lens may have been filtering out blue and red light to produce a more yellow -green tone.

This made me wonder just how accurate my editing of color images has been. I've been reconsidering getting a color calibrator. I have not scored well on the color vision tests, so I'm thinking the cataracts could have something to do with that.

Has anyone else had the same experience?

My dad said his vision when from yellowish and low contrast to fully rich color and contrast (and normal? or beyond normal?) afterwards.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

It is not difficult to reason that most slight individual-to-individual variations in the cone cells may result in varying degrees of color discrimination between two people even though neither could be said to be "color-blind." Then there are reports of tetrachromats, rare individuals who supposedly have four types of cone cells rather than three, and are thus even more sensitive to variations in color than most humans.

In fact those metamerism issues are why they say the three primary color-management system that is used is not ideal.

One issue comes up when switching between different display tech types. So people are like how come the probe says the colors are the same but my standard gamut and wide gamut or my CCFL vs LED backlit or my OLED vs laser projector and so on all look a bit different even when calibrated the same way.

The problem is that the primaries in different technologies have different spikes and a simple three primary system can't account for that so they can measure the same on that system and yet produce something a bit different in each case to the eye. Then you say well why not just apply a metameric correction matrix (and some displays have such a toggle) but the problem is that it's common enough that people have slight variations in reading this part of that of the spectrum and there is no one correction that translates one display tech to another perfectly across all colors and white balance for everyone.

It also means that any strictly tristim color probe can only measure 'correctly' for one exact sub-type of a display types unless you apply a correction matrix even ignoring further metamerism issues that still remain. OTOH a spectrophotometer measures a full spectrum plot sweep so automatically works across everything and you don't need a correction for every single display. Except, that's not usually true since most are not fine grained enough and many display types have some very narrow spikes in their primaries and so even the spectros are not perfect across various displays unless you use one of those $10,000+ professional ones.


If they go to full spectrum color balance where you don't build colors out of R,G,B but treat each color as a full and very fine grained spectrum plot across the visible wavelengths then you can at least solve the issue of different tech looking different to the same person part of the problem providing you use measuring equipment that is fine grained enough.

The i1 DIsplayPro can be fit with spectrum plot corrections internally even though it's a tri-stim so it can be internally upgraded to read each display type almost perfectly (but they have to have provided the spectrum file for the display in question).

AFAIK no commercial software or OS use full spectrum plot color-management although a few in-house custom research systems do.

 

[LetTheRightLensIn]

I'm just glad we have at least come to the point of being able to measuer colour. We know precisely what colour is, how you perceive it is your problem.
That said, how you perceive colour shouldn't affect your ability to accurately judge a photo as long as your monitor produces the same colour accurately.
If your greens are all wonky then the forest valley will be just as funky while you're standing above it as it looks on the monitor, reproducing what you saw is what matters.

Only without going to fine-grained full spectrum sweep color calibration even the above isn't really true.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I'm just glad we have at least come to the point of being able to measuer colour. We know precisely what colour is, how you perceive it is your problem.

I'm not so sure about that.

Color standards are artificial standards and a color defined by light of a certain wavelength is just based on the perception of a group of people. We do not know what it really is in a sense that nature tells us that this exact color is "Red" for example.Its much like length measurement standards, a arbitrary system of reference, but even more inexact.


There is a color space that we use, but it is empirical.

 

[retroreflection]

While lens material might have an effect, I suggest there is a stronger effect due to a return to using your fovea after cataract surgery. Cataracts tend to obscure the central portion of the lens. This tends to obscure the fovea, where the finest "pixel pitch" and full complement of rods and cones are located. Away from the fovea, the retina is optimized for low light, and is hardly able to see red.
Cataract surgery opens the fovea to the world again, it is shocking to see colors like you used to. A similar shock is experienced by those of us who got glasses after our eyes went quite bad. I remember wondering how I could recognize people from far away.
Our vision system uses tons of software (with programmers who had no qualms about making stuff up from the flimsiest evidence) to enhance the signals. Real red signals have been fading for a decade or so? Just guess and fill it in.

 

[Zeidora]

There are two aspects to your question:
- Seeing natural-light color. Natural light is a form of black-body radiation, and the brain is extremely good at doing white balance for various natural color temperatures. So your MD was certainly correct, that although you see a distinct difference before and after surgery, those differences will be moderated by the brain over a few weeks. You may remember the upside down goggles experiment, where the brain learns to turn the image up-side down even in adults.
- There certainly is an individual component to it, most evident in people who are color blind, but there certainly is a spectrum.
- Monitor calibration is a completely different beast. It is not a black-body radiator, therefore, color calibration (= making screen behave like a black body radiator) is essential, particular for matching screen to print (within inherent limitation of transmission vs reflective colors etc., but that is what soft-proofing is for). I also use a colormunki spider for my displays, have done so for years (previously with Monaco optix). I would be more worried that you adjusted your images on a non-calibrated display, and worry less about the effect of surgery.

Most people these days post images on-line, and there all bets are off, because as the content generator you have no control over the screens on which your images are viewed. I just ignore that factor.