OK so if it turns out he has protanopia then he's a dichromat, and it's not just color discrimination differences he has, but there is also a brightness loss component I believe, but I'm not sure how significant it is. Anyway, I think as long as you convey certain "no-no's" like green or blue people looking sick or dead, he should understand this. Maybe in some cases that's the look he's going for, but an overwhelming majority of the time it's not. Same for cartoonishly orange or red people, which looks unbelievable and silly, but not nauseating. There's some pretty clear science backing up that blue and green skin tones, across all ethnic types, is a big and abrupt loser. Probably for good reason, "ick that body might make me sick, let's get out of here," sort of early warning. Otherwise he's going to see things in a way others won't and it may be interesting. Obviously the world doesn't look wrong to him. I have a pretty good eye for color discrepancies, neutrals, contrast, and can do a pretty decent job getting display to print correlation. But 9 times out of 10 I can't photograph my way out of a hat so I think having that eye for photography is more valuable. Chris On Jul 25, 2011, at 3:00 AM, Peter Miles wrote:
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 _______________________________________________