Photography is hard enough on its own if you’re a picky photographer or very critical of your work, it’s even harder to deal with color if you’re color blind. Color blindness isn’t uncommon, but what it means is often mistaken. By saying I’m colorblind I’m not saying I can’t see color, I can tell the sky is blue and the grass is green. Obviously there are people who can’t see any color, but far more common are people who have difficulty telling certain colors apart. Generally speaking, the term color blind does more to confuse than it does to enlighten. Unfortunately it’s the accepted term for people both completely blind to color and color deficient (like myself).
There are three basic kinds:
- Completely monochromatic vision, where two or three of the photo pigments in your eyes cones are missing.
- Dichromacy occurs when you’re missing a pigment: red (protanopia), green (deuteranopia) or blue (tritanopia).
- Anomalies occur where one of your cone pigments isn’t quite right and doesn’t have the right spectral sensitivity, resulting in a reduction of your ability to discriminate colors. The red and green pigments are the most similar so it is easier for differences in them to impact the ability to distinguish colors. Protanomaly occurs when you have a slightly shifted red sensitivity, deuteranomaly (what I have) occurs when your green sensitivity isn’t quite right. Tritanomaly is uncommon (as is tritanopia) and this occurs when your blue pigment isn’t right. This makes blue-yellow discrimination difficult.
As a deuteranomalous person, I can see red and green, but I often have a great deal of difficulty telling some hues apart. To go even further, in spite of this, my overall color discrimination of all hues is rather poor, not just red-green.
Testing color vision
One test of color vision is to use the Ishihara test with the colored dots that are devised to show certain shapes. They can be made to show numbers for a person with regular vision and appear blank for someone with varying types of color blindness, however the tables can also be turned. They can be made to show shapes for color blind people but not color-normal. You’ve probably all seen these, but chances are if you have normal vision, you’ve never seen one you can’t see the shape in.
Another, and more in-depth test, is the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test (which has 85 hues, don’t ask me why they call it 100 hue). This is a series of color chips with a number on the other side and it’s in four sets. You organize them by logical procession from one end of the set to the other. On one side you could have a peach color, on the other it would be green and a color normal person could organize them with little error. You tabulate the score by recording the sum of the differences between the number on a patch and the numbers on the back of the two adjacent to it. Since they’re numbered sequentially a perfect score is a 2 for every color. The more you screw up, the higher your score goes.
This is what someone with normal color vision and good color discrimination can produce in this test (click to enlarge):
This is what I get during the same test (click to enlarge):
Notice the scale on the radius of the chart (the numbers labeling the concentric rings). My friend with good color vision never exceeds 4 while I go past 10. My two trials don’t even match each other in where I screw up, and if I did more trials it wouldn’t improve. My friend did better his second time through which is normal for most people after they loosen up and get in to the test a little more.
To detect varying types of color vision defects, certain patterns are looked for in these plots. If you have a strong deviation at the 10 and 4 o’clock positions, you’re deuteranomalous. I exhibit that behavior (as I should) but the rest of my scores aren’t very good either because even for other colors, my ability to tell them apart is pretty poor.
What does it mean?
For someone like me, this makes playing with color really tricky. I always enjoyed B&W photography (and some day I hope I can set up a darkroom and get back in to it), but color has always been hard. Shooting film is tricky for color since every film has a preset preference for a certain white balance. Films like Velvia which are easily excitable and don’t perform well in unideal lighting conditions are hard for me to work with. Obviously I can’t print color in an enlarger very well, so when I do I have often had to rely on someone else to steer the colors in the right direction.
Computers make color much easier for me, but it’s still not perfect. If you give someone with normal color vision a calibrated monitor and some photos to work with, they can zip through them adjusting color temperature, saturation and playing with hues and never think twice about it. If you give me the same task you can’t expect the same quality results. Calibration helps in a gross scale, but fine tuning for me (other than gray scale/contrast and brightness levels) is mostly a moot issue because my descrimination is poor enough to make me an unreliable judge of color anyway.
Before digital cameras I scanned film quite a bit. 35mm, medium format and large format negatives and slides when scanned can produce excellent results (and huge files). If someone with normal color vision wants to adjust the white balance, they just do it. If I want to adjust it I have to find something in the scene that should be neutral and adjust the overall balance of the scene until that object has uniform RGB values in the color picker. If I want to push the color of something a certain way, I have to use what I know about the RGB values of colors to adjust something to the values I have in my head, and hope they are the right colors. It is very easy for that to go horribly wrong, and a nice pink sunset could turn green or I could suck green out of trees by adding too much magenta.
I jumped feet first in to digital photography a couple years ago and haven’t looked back because setting white balance is a snap with digital cameras. I can also adjust in raw conversion later using color temperatures based on lighting conditions or the time of day. I can’t say the same for dealing with film. It is easier to please my eyes because I am unable to see differences that might be obvious to the average observer, but I still try to get things “right.”
In the end
I can do a lot of the things everyone else does, but often with less confidence and often with inconsistent results. There are areas I often tip-toe around like playing with colors to enhance saturation or change the tones of certain objects in a photograph. I could just convert everything to B&W through the channel mixer and have a lot of fun that way, but I like color photographs, and screwed up as they may sometimes look and I’m not going to stop taking them or stop tinkering with them. I continue to play the balance between what looks right to me and what looks right to everyone else.
Last modified: August 6, 2009
Good article. Being a color-deficient (Protanomalous) person myself, I can really relate to this. I spend hours adjusting white-balance and keep asking my wife “Is this better? Does this look real?”. It drives her nuts and is really frustrating for me. (I’ve also thought about just shooting black and white and being done with color… but even my poor eyes like the colors I do see… whatever they are.)
I’ve been told the leaves in this picture I took are neon-green and unnatural looking. Maybe they are, but the white-balance and saturation is as close to what I think I saw that I can get:
http://www.pbase.com/shauncox/image/87176590
Anyway, thanks for writing this. I enjoyed it.
This is a very informative article. I found it especially interesting that when you would repeat the test, the results would not be the same. Even your friend who was not color blind did not score a perfect score.
To be a color blind photographer shows that you’ve not only got the dedication to put in more time per photo, but more importantly, that ultimately if your photos do not please yourself, you are into photography for the wrong reasons.
what chromosomes has genetic mutation for color blindness disease?
You are officially my new hero.
Matika, color blindness is carried on the X chromosome (exclusively I believe). Since males are XY, they don’t have another X chromosome that might cancel out a genetic defect on the other X. Females are XX, so generally speaking as I understand it the second X chromosome can blot out and negate a defect in the other X. This is why females with color vision deficiencies are so rare.
Great article! I do not know what pigment I lack. I can confuse red and green; dark blue with violet; grass sometimes looks orange to me. My office had about 600 unused markers in storage, but unorganized. I was tasked with organizing them into colors so that we could give them away; four hours later someone had to redo it for me. Good times.
Wow thats how they got color in pictures
How the Color Deficient Person Sees the World:
http://colorvisiontesting.com/what%20colorblind%20people%20see.htm
Good site to show normal sighted people what it is like to be color deficient.
The “normal vision” and “color deficient” images all look the same to me.
Very interesting. I learned something new today and have a new respect for the difficulties this most cause for a photographer. I can only imagine how that would be.
I have a friend that is an amazing photographer and he also happens to be color blind. His landscapes and seascape photographs capture something that I haven’t seen from other photographers. His black and white photos are particularly striking. Now I know he has an advantage and may see subtle things that others don’t. Wow! Thanks for all the good info.
I cannot see any numbers in the dots from the link that Joey Skinner gave us, however when I look at the photos on that page and tell my wife the colors I see, they seem to be the same colors that she sees. She does see the numbers. Why am I confused on that part, why does it appear that I see the colors in the photos correctly, but cannot see the numbers in the dots. BTW I am visiting this page because I already know that I am color blind( I do not know exactly which kind yet). I found out when the US Navy told me I couldn,t be a part of the electronics field 20 years ago. BIG BUMMER!
Hi David,
I’m not actually sure what those Ishihara plates on that site are supposed to indicate, I don’t see anything in them either. However if you take an Ishihara test there are certain plates which are designed so that only certain types of colorblind people will see certain digits. Although doing it on your computer is far from ideal, you can certainly look at the plates on this site to get an idea how different vision properties may display completely different numbers.
http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm
Thanks for this great article. I’m a colorblind photographer myself and go through the same exact problems. I’m often shooting sports and when I look in my archive, I sometimes get different result, even though I often shoot in the same indoor arena. It’s the same light source everytime.
The biggest problem I have, is when I cover concerts. There’s often some different colored lights that change. Changing the temperatur and tint here is really tricky for me, where non-colorblind people could easily run through the series of photos. I think I have to use a lot more time on just trying out random settings, untill it looks right to me. And still I’m really insecure about the result.
I had to say goodbye to several education plans, because I’m colorblind, including graphic designer/layout artist and commercial photography. Now I’m doing photojournalism and really love it. It’s pretty much self-taught and fear that they might reject me, if I try to seek into a journalism school (as a photojournalist).
But reading this article really put my mind a bit more to rest, as I thought there was something wrong with me, because the modern applications should be able to do everything for me.
I’d say don’t let your colorblindness stop you as you certainly aren’t the first and won’t be the last to be challenged by this! If you do go to school somewhere to study in photojournalism hopefully it’ll be somewhere with understanding professors who will help and encourage rather than discourage. Regardless of what you do, I’d love to hear how it continues to go for you!
There are a lot of tricks you can adopt to help make your life easier. If at a sports arena you’re working with constant and uniform lighting, taking a white balance reference image and applying that to all the images should work well. Although from what I understand, if you work for a publication you’d probably just be shooting in auto white balance and the editors will work out the colors. I’m certainly not the best person to ask about that but I seem to recall reading about that being the process for a lot of organizations. If you’re freelancing then I suppose you’re out of luck there!
Learning to color correct by the numbers, using reference materials and taking a test shot in a location before shooting, and knowing what parts of an image to look at to correct colors (and what the correct colors are for that object) are things that you get better at with time. Since we certainly can’t rely on our vision to tell us what’s right like others do, we have to learn the RGB values we should expect things to have.
Modern applications really aren’t made to help us in our plight, so we just have to learn to work with the tools it gives us. Sometimes I still have to run something by someone else if I just can’t figure it out myself, but that’s certainly become less frequent over the years.
Me and 2 of my brothers are colorblind, and we are all film makers. I wonder which occupation is more difficult for a colorblind person. Keep up the good work.
I’m a colorblind filmmaker, as well. Post-production is difficult for me because I’m constantly told about red and green hues in skin tone that I just can’t pick up on. It’s so incredibly frustrating, and nearly impossible to “compensate” with certain hues due to the sheer complexity of color.
Thank you for your post. I’m going to save it and share it with friends and colleagues who do not understand my dilemma.
So do you mean that you can easily distinguish colours like red, yellow, green and blue from each other but things get trickier when it comes to distinguishing green from turquoise?
M a doctor and myself have d same problem..i can identify the basic colors..but its difficult wen it comes to shades..it was just other day wen i came across a movie poster whose title was in red with sky as background…hell i couldn read it..
I see this is an old thread, but I have a question. Does this deficiency I share make it more imperative to calibrate my monitors? (dell U2410′s)
I work as a photographers assistant and have the broader plan of working as a Photographer. Having a colour deficiency can be extremely frustrating. But like its been said in a lot of these replies; you do find ways round it. I often work as a digital operator and tend to work off the presets on the software, RGB numbers or sampling of what should be a neutral point (or a combination of all three).
It does haunt me from time to time, especially when I’m feeling less driven or confident at the time. I think I use it as an excuse sometimes but have got better over the years. I know there will be times when I will get stuck but in general there’s always someone about to help.
I find myself constantly torn between going against the odds of already what is an incredibly tough industry or if I should be more realistic about it all and find something else.
But I just try to put it to one side and keep pushing on..
I am shade blind and can relate to this article. I have problems adjusting shade in Photoshop and often require the aid of my wife to spot problems. For people like myself that can see colors, but not shades I have often wondered why special eyewear could not be developed to help with identifying shades.
Im not going to lie.. im colorblind being able to photo edit pictures is a walk in the park for me, so I think it’s YOU.
I’m glad to hear that you have no trouble with it. Unfortunately your ease doesn’t make it easier for me or the other colorblind artists I’ve spoken with before who experience similar frustrations. One thing you have to keep in mind is that colorblindness isn’t a simple thing, there are different types and different levels of severity so your type or degree of colorblindness may not be as much of a problem. Another possibility is that some of us are concerned about achieving a different level of quality or accuracy (where appropriate) in our final images than you are.
Just found this Great site for people like ME…. i.e.= On the color test card I can ONLY see 2 (Two) of the numbers on it… The Number “5″ and Number “12″……. I get “color confused” with “Green//Red” and “Blue//Purple” — Also I sometimes see “Pink” as a gray tone….
Being a photographer – and I am one that struggles with the “Correctness” of color – I have been trying to work the colors in CS-5, and without the help and suggestions of others I can not produce a good and “true color” Print…. Everything (monitor and printer) is calibrated. Is there a method to make the colors as to the “normal” range by myself? I think that I might be able to use “LAB COLOR” and do it by Numbers, rather than that of my “different” sight….
ANY and ALL suggestions will be honored.
James..
jk_photo@hotmail.com
Thank You One and All..