This thread answers the question, I guess, as to why I print in 1200 dpi, and why 300 dpi (which is good enough for the average photographer) is so fuzzy as to be unusable. People get on my for optimizing sharpness that they can't see all the time, but here's why.
Originally posted by RGlasel A cousin of mine is so strongly colour blind that red and green traffic lights look like different shades of grey. His trade is forensic accounting, not photography. There are a few blue-green colours that look grey to me, but I don't think that affects my photography as much as much as my aversion to oversaturated colours. I have noticed that most of the photographs posted here have the background diminished in various ways in order to emphasize a single central object or concept. I try to capture multiple objects and themes in a single image. I suspect that differences in subjective perspective outweigh differences in visual acuity.
I'm not that badly off, but the "yellow" or "amber" lenses produce the same light as the "red" ones do. So I either have to ask someone in the car with me whether I have to stop or not, and if there's no one to ask, I just stop anyway - which may drive the people behind me crazy, but what the heck? Patience is a virtue, right? What idiot came up with the scheme of using the primary colors of PIGMENT for street lights instead of those for LIGHT??? I could tell the difference if the lights were magenta, yellow-green, and cyan (blue-green).
And, while we're on the subject of road conditions, here's the thing that makes me crazy: people with "normal color vision" rely heavily on color to provide contrast data; I don't, I ignore color. As a result, things are totally washed out for them at dawn and dusk, while I am blinded by mid-day light. I can wear sunglasses, while the color-normals turn their brightest headlights on, clearly trying to cause a wreck by blinding oncoming drivers. Because of the increased sensitivity to luminosity that results from poorer color-vision (which I refer to as "wolf-vision"), I see best at dawn and dusk.
I'm with you on the oversaturated color bit - I often say that if you're wowed by the technique, then you're not looking at a "subject"; the result may be "art" but it's not "photography", by my lights. If you're thinking about the lighting during the play, then that's bad lighting, no matter how brilliantly designed. And too much make up makes a woman look "tarty" rather than pretty. If you notice it, it's too much.
---------- Post added 2021-12-11 at 05:33 AM ----------
Originally posted by biz-engineer They see all photos as vintage, even when freshly captured.
And those with normal color vision see them as post-impressionistic paintings. I'm thinking Seurat, only with larger blobs of color.
This trait is an important environmental adaptation, for those living in a state of nature armed with simple weapons (i.e. men, not women). That's because I can see Bambi tucked down among the tall grass from much farther off (i.e., arrow-shooting distance) than a similar man with normal color vision because I am not fooled by color cameoflage and the texture, or timbre of the light, if you will, reflected off the deer is so different from that from the weeds, that Bambi sticks out like a sore thumb. Hence, my ancestors lived to reproduce, and their children lived to reproduce, while other people's children starved. It's a "we're just coming out of the Ice Age kind of thing".
I characterize the difference between my way of seeing and that of people having good color vision is this, if you are of sufficient age to recognize the references: I see the world in 8k ultra high definition but with 8 bit color with the saturation turned down very low in the red and green spectrum, while my wife (who has not just good but way superior color vision) sees the world in VGA but with 32 bit colors turned up all the way. Of course these characteristics are most likely normally distributed on the Gaussian curve, so in a sense, we're all color blind, it's just a matter of degree (most of us, after all, do not perceive long-wave ultraviolet or infrared).
I've collected the various comments I've made previously on this subject below, in no particular order and without any indication as to the subject of the thread to which I was responding.
... Funny you should mention B&W photography. I used to do a lot of that back when film and developer were pretty inexpensive. But, being color blind also means being what I call, "resolution enhanced". I've got more luminosity "pixels" per square inch of retina than people with good color vision, because the receptors for color are relatively huge and take up a lot of real estate on the sensor. Since I don't have so many of those, I've got gazillions more of the relatively tiny luminosity receptors. It's like I'm seeing in QHD 4K in (almost) HDR B&W while other people are seeing in VGA in 32 bit full color with a limited dynamic range (wolf vision - that's my superpower). (I have to qualify that a little - I have red/green color blindness, normal in the blue/yellow range.) Anyway, I can't stand digital cameras' "black and white" because it's not truly black and white, it's grayscale, which looks entirely different to me, and I figure if you're going to do that kind of gradient-based picture, you may as well have color. ...
... I think it's a big problem that the data is presented (in the viewfinder) in red. The advantage of red text is that it is less likely to screw up your ability to see at night, but the disadvantage is that males of Northern European extraction (especially) are likely to have red-green color-blindness (such as myself). So all I see is dark lettering on a dark background, nearly impossible to make out. If they made it magenta instead of red, they'd preserve much of the value of red text, but the blue content would make it visible to folks like me. ...
... I'm color-blind, myself, so my approach, which I see as an alternative to your switch to simulated monochrome, is to ignore color. Set the camera to "natural" and set the white balance to "auto" (or better if you can, "multi-auto" a-la K-1) and don't touch the "hue slider" in post processing. If you're at all concerned about white balance being right, stick a light diffusing filter in front of the lens to create a custom setting on your first shot on location. And do your post-processing on a monitor that comes from the factory properly calibrated. If you're the sort who likes to yocky-fooch the white balance to make your image warmer or cooler, do it very sparingly. No one will notice you don't see color as they do. ...
... And, to continue the conversation, I find I've developed a new "pet peeve": over-sharpening. I realize that those with resolution-impairment (i.e., people with good color vision) see the world in terms of blobs of color, and oversharpening can compensate for that deficiency by making it appear that there is more detail in the picture than what they'd be able to see normally. But since I have high-resolution vision (being color-blind), overly-sharpened pictures come out looking like pictures of sand. There comes a point where sharpening in software turns into a form of distracting distortion. It takes "grainy" to a new level otherwise achieved only with very high ISO values. ...
... That could be a test for color-blindness. people who ignore color as contrast data focus instead on the texture (complexity of the waveform) of the reflected light instead - and feathers don't look anything like bark from that perspective. So people who can see the birds right off are probably color-blind (as well as resolution-enhanced).
When I was in high school, they told the Army I was color blind. So the Army started twisting my arm to quit school and go to be a point-man on infantry patrols in VietNam; they figured I wouldn't be fooled by the color-camouflage (right on that point) and that I'd be able to spot the snipers in the trees long enough to shoot 'em down. Yeah, right. I figured my life-expectancy once in that job would be about fifteen minutes. That war was a big reason for my having been the first of my family to attend college (that and Lyndon Johnson's "great society" program - they were generous with student aid at that time). ...
... Red square, eh? I thought that was a place in Moscow! The reason I didn't go into electical engineering was because I couldn't tell resistors apart - they're color coded and I'm color-blind. So "red" doesn't really show up for me. But now I know it's supposed to be there, I'll look for it and research its use. It might be one of those things I've turned off in the settings menu as excess gim-cracky. Incidentally, the color-blindness has an interesting effect - since I have fewer relatively huge color receptors per square inch of retina, I've got gazillions more of the tiny white/black receptors - huge increase in resolution and light-gathering capability, which is why I'm so picky about things looking sharp. (Also why I almost never mess with the colors as recorded by the camera in postprocessing.) ...
And here's a prior thread on the same subject:
A colorblind photographer? - PentaxForums.com