Is it me, or do the protanopia (top right) and deuteranopia (bottom left) images look identical? If I’m colour-blind this would be a weird way to find out.
Now, if only someone could filter it to simulate non-colour-blindness for me, so I can see what they see!
allaboutvision.com/conditions/color-blind-glasses.htm
Allegedly the EnChroma glasses work better the weaker your color deficiency is (i.e. they work worse the worse you already are at telling colors apart). For me there's a pronounced effect but it's mostly through shifting all colors more into violet and yellow.
Using them was the first time green LED traffic lights appeared "saturated" to me although yellow traffic lights appeared a bit darker than normal. A clear blue sky appears vibrant but with a noticeable violet tint. Flowers look neat as reds and purples "pop" in the same way pure blues and yellows do normally. I can tell whether lawns are healthy or dried out.
But they don't "fix" my color vision. Of course not. They can't add color where I'm physically unable to perceive it. They wouldn't allow me to pass most colorblindness tests or operate machinery that requires normal color vision. They can however modulate some parts of the visible spectrum so others stand out more. And they're really good at that.
I've had my EnChroma sunglasses for a few years now and I use them instead of regular sunglasses in most situations (except when I expect they might get damaged). I would probably buy them again. I considered buying regular EnChroma glasses but I've heard the effect isn't as strong and as I'm already not in the group benefiting the most, I worry the effect wouldn't be good enough to justify the price tag. YMMV.
EDIT: I'm fully aware of the dramatic reaction videos that made them popular all over social media for a while. I saw them after I found out about EnChroma and after I had already decided to give them a try but before I was able to do so. If anything, these videos made my experience of first using them more underwhelming. Yes, I could "see" purple in a different way than ever before, but knowing the reaction videos and knowing the person I was with knew them almost triggered a form of imposter syndrome because I simply didn't experience the overwhelming sensation the videos suggested I should perform.
Fortunately I don't need short/long corrective lenses, so there's no way I'd wear glasses just for improving colour perception a bit. Even if they were free (I'd try them as a gimmick, sure, I just doubt I'd want to wear them regularly).
(I'm sure it doesn't always feel that way)
https://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/
But no one seemed particularly interested. Let me know if you are...
(It's just greyscale to me fwiw, as someone non-tritanopically (I've never been sure what, nor the optician, doesn't seem to be cleanly proto or deuteranomoly, perhaps some combination?) colour-blind viewing it filtered to simulate that. On some hand-wavey high level I lack the ability to see what's left after what I can see has been removed, I suppose.)
With protanopia, the L cone cell is affected. For deuteranopia, it's the M cone cell.
The visibility probably depends a lot on your display color calibration and how fil spectrum your ambient light is. Incandescent "soft white" and modern imitations, common in household lighting, is usually yellow/orange.
To me, one of the images clearly has a yellow color where the other image has a green-ish color.
And I watched the gif prior to reading your description of the difference - I experience this strange phenomenon sometimes whereby the colour of something (or the presence of different colours) morphs in front of my eyes, after someone describes it or claims that it's there. (Red and green bars on a chart for example might all be the same, then someone says 'blah blah in the second red bar' and all of a sudden I can distinguish them, see the red or green that wasn't there before. Or a bridge in London that suddenly looked green when I was told it was called Green Bridge.) I wish it was easier to learn more about it, because I find that kind of fascinating (and mildly 'scary'!) - must surely mean it's not just about the eyes, but my brain is smoothing over some rough edges as though small red/green differences are assumed to be wrong, but if someone confirms them then the parameters are altered.
Your description of how you see colors morphing once they're described is interesting! The brain definitely does a whole lot of complex visual processing which we don't notice, such as filtering out the big hole in your retina which nerves go through, and retroactively replacing the memory of your eyes moving with what you see after they've moved. And your peripheral vision is almost entirely grayscale, yet the brain fills in the colors it expects to be there so it doesn't feel grayscale. It doesn't surprise me that when color information is missing due to color blindness, it will fill in the missing color information from other sources.
I haven’t ever experienced the reperception-by-suggestion phenomenon that you describe. But I do think that, when I was young, I gradually became a bit better at distinguishing and remembering colors than I had been as a child, perhaps because having been told that I was color-blind made me pay more attention to colors. “Purple” was a mystery to me when I was ten; by the age of twenty, I could usually distinguish it from blue.
Those do appear to be literally identical to my eyes as well. I made a similar gif of those: https://p.mort.coffee/UIt.gif -- I can only see the noise shifting around a little bit. And GIMP agrees; the RGB histogram looks incredibly similar between the two images (https://p.mort.coffee/tn8.png vs https://p.mort.coffee/t3z.png).
However, if colour-blindness is not so strong for most people, then these articles should depict a lesser form of colour-blindness as well, to more accurately convey the experience. I don't think I've ever seen a post on colour-blindness that did.
> Why is protanopia like deuteranopia? Red and green colorblind deficiencies (deuteranopia and protanopia) are very similar, as these cones often overlap. Therefore, protanopia and deuteranopia can often eliminate the ability to see both red and green, showing the world in vibrant blues and yellows, as well as very similar browns, oranges, reds, and greens.
> People with deuteranomaly and protanomaly are often incorrectly diagnosed collectively as ‘red-green’ colour blind because both types generally have difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, browns and oranges. They also commonly confuse different types of blue and purple hues and many other colour combinations.
> The answer is that dichromatic colorblindness is imitated by assuming two of the three types of receptors receive the same light input. In deuteranopia, for example, the assumption is that the neural receptors expecting medium (M) and long (L) wavelength light are both receiving signals from cones with long (L) pigments. This results in the yellow you noticed. Note also that deuteranopia and protanopia don’t result in exactly the same hue of yellow because of the difference between their peak sensitivities. In one case it is assumed all signals are coming from L pigments and in the other all from M pigments.
Seems like there is more variation in chromes filters than the ones shown in the article.
BTW they look the same to me too.
In chrome: console > rendering > emulate vision deficiencies
I even overlayed the two images over each other and flicked back and forth between them.. they are identical