KnowKnowledge

  Being colorblind comes with its fair share of headaches: We can’t become pilots, often need help matching articles of clothing, and struggle to perceive traffic lights from afar. Still, the biggest hurdle might be fielding questions like: “How is what you see different from what I see?” That's one I've heard all my life; it's usually followed by ad hoc tests of my ability (or inability) to perceive the hues of nearby objects. While I’ve begrudgingly entertained the latter, I’ve never been able to adequately answer the question about how exactly my sight differs from the average person’s. Until now. WHAT IS COLORBLINDNESS, EXACTLY? A common misconception is that colorblindness has to do with an insufficient supply of rod and cone cells in the eye. It’s actually only the cones that play a part in colorblindness, and the issue isn’t with quantity—even severe sufferers boast the standard 6 or 7 million—but of these cells’ behavior. All cone cells are armed with molecules call

  Photographers typically spend a lot of time thinking about color, everything from editing in Photoshop, calibrating a screen, or lighting with gels and filters, to deciding on wardrobe, set design, and locations. There is no escaping the importance of color in this profession, and yet the way we see and describe color is not so simple. Color vision games can be a great way to test your perception of the world around you and compare that to fellow photographers. How we see color gets complicated fast because it's determined by physics, biology, and culture. Differences in any one drastically changes your perception, giving you a different experience than someone else. On top of that, the brain can be tricked into convincing you that you are seeing one color when you are actually seeing another. There are so many variables to how any given viewer is seeing color, it makes you second guess all that time spent agonizing in Photoshop. I have always been obsessed with the concept of co