Re: OT: Supporting a color blind photographer
Re: OT: Supporting a color blind photographer
- Subject: Re: OT: Supporting a color blind photographer
- From: Peter Miles <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:00:55 +1200
Hi Chris
Thanks for your in-depth replies. I had not realised there was such a
large range of red/green color blindness. Great that photoshop has
some of them included as an aid to designers.
Also thanks for the heads up on the likelihood of his screen to
print mismatches. I'll check with some prints to get a feel of how
big a difference he is seeing. For what it's worth I had shown this
student the photodisc test image* on a profiled monitor screen. He
said he couldn't see any difference in the image when the protanopia
simulation was on.
Interesting about the hunting. I heard that during the second world
war colorblind 'spotters' were used in planes to see through the
camouflage that would fool normally sighted people. And as for the
balding theory! that put a smile on my face.
Kind regards
Peter Miles
* (http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/downloadable_2/Test_Image_2.zip)
On 25/07/2011, at 6:40 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Jul 23, 2011, at 3:44 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
How significant these differences are, and how they manifest
themselves depend on the type of color blindness he has. I see
plenty of people with normal color vision go through weeks of
miscues on what makes images look good or bad. So some of his
departures from what makes for good looking prints may not be
related to his color vision discrepancy, or color management.
To further elaborate on this, and kinda correct myself also, the
two Photoshop color blindness simulations: protanopia and
deuteranopia are the most extreme varieties of "red-green" color
blindness. So even though both combined are around 2% of all men,
and aren't very common, they represent the greatest departure from
normal vision (in the category of red-green color blindness), and
thus simulating them ensures designers don't design something that
a significant minority won't understand (like the word DANGER in
red over a brown background).
Someone with either protanomaly or deuteranomaly experience a
potentially wide range between almost normal vision and the above
types of color blindness. And combined this is around 7-8% of the
male population, so it's much more common but also much more
variable most likely. But not as bad as the previously mentioned
types.
So anyone with normal vision thinking that the photographer they're
assisting actually sees images like the protanopia and deuteranopia
soft proofs are probably mislead, unless the photographer is a
dichromat. The intent of the soft proofs is to help designers make
sure they design content that is understandable (or not dangerous)
to most people. So by targeting worse case scenario, these two soft
proof options do that.
It's entirely possible (statistically likely) that he doesn't have
such a significant color discrimination problem. I'd still
encourage him to find out the type of color blindness he as, and
the degree if it's an anomalous type of trichromacy. And do some
experiments to find out if he's producing green or magenta cast
prints (better magenta than green).
I think it was in 2006, I went to a session at the Conference on
World Affairs, "The Big O, the G-Spot, Homosexuality & Other
Mysteries of Sexuality". Great session. The presenter was a heart
surgeon, but I guess the subject of the session was (quite) a bit
of a hobby of his. He figured that there may be a good reason for
these kinds of color discrimination problems, because even though
they're rare, they're statistically significant. He proposed that
in a typical hunting party of a dozen or maybe a couple more,
having 1 person on average improved the chances of the party
successfully finding prey. Why? Because apparently the color blind
guy has a certain "immunity" to the effects of animal camouflage in
its natural environment. The camouflage must act as a kind of
"noise" effect on people with normal vision that causes the animal
to blend into the background, whereas this noise doesn't affect the
color blind guy.
And then this presenter proposed that premature balding in men
occurs in about the same percentage, and that maybe it was Baldy's
shiny head that reflected light whenever he moved that would cause
a game animal to turn its head, kinda like "what was that?" and the
first person in the party to see that movement would be the color
blind guy, before the animal was spooked and took off running.
Hunting party = 1. Animal = 0.
Meanwhile, the color blind guy has 11 or so buddies that will tell
him, "uhh yeah you don't want to eat that" since they can better
discriminate between different kinds of plants, many of which can
make a person sick or sometimes kill them.
Chris Murphy _______________________________________________
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