The Colour of Magic? Erm.. Mauve?

I’m not sure how obvious it is with some of my dodgy colour post-production but I was born with the decided photographic hindrance of being colour-blind. My parents first realised when we were on a family holiday in France and when they pointed to the beautiful poppy field out of the right window of the car, I looked left. Bummer. The available tests have always been incredibly frustrating as there are a significant amount of screens that have absolutely no number in at all to me and, until I decided to try out the only option available to resolve it, I always had a niggling feeling that the rest of the world’s population had met up when I was out to discuss a hilarious practical joke.

For those of you who aren’t that up on their hue-deficient freaks, the best way I’ve described it is that it often feels like I missed the day at school when everyone was taught all about colours. I can see most colours but can’t name them. I say “most” as sometimes it’s completely baffling when people tell me there are two different colours in front of me. It’s only through years of experience that I can start to think along the lines of “if it’s a darker blue, it may well be purple” and “if it’s a darker green, it may be brown”. This might sound completely incorrect but it’s often the only way I can make an educated guess on what hues I’m looking at. In an everyday world, the lack of recognition doesn’t cause any problems (apart from my occasional dress-sense mistakes..) but as soon as photoshop and photography is involved, problems can begin.

Some things in life are easier than others. Sky is blue, grass is green, wood is brown. However, what colour is skin? Skin coloured. Okaaay.. Shooting press conferences in mixed lighting conditions can produce problems for me as magenta and red casts start to affect skin tones. Some software has pre-sets for this issue too but if the person is from an ethnic group other than the safely pre-programmed Caucasian, the results can’t always be trusted so the human judgement returns.

If colour casts are tricky, it’s easy to convert to mono but working for a news agency, even if I do provide a mono image, I also have to provide a colour version too.

Also, battery chargers are nearly always a pain; charging=flashing, charged=solid colour. Why can’t everyone stick to that rather than having a pin-prick of light change from a subtle hue of red to a subtle hue of green? My batteries must be the most over-charged in the world. Software has helped as well as various toys like the expodisc but having an improved general colour vision is the holy grail.

Having moved to London and finding that I was earning enough to consider making enquires about the latest technology, I decided to give the Chromagen lens a go. After researching who offered the service, I went along to one of the larger opticians in London to discuss what was available to me. In my consultation, we went through the basic tests like the one previously mentioned and the optician ascertained the exact type of deficiency I had. Once it was decided, I then had the option of getting glasses made or a contact lens. Here lies the first problem that you can see from the image at the top of this post; for the system to work, you only need one eye to be covered. This means either having one freaky eye a la David Bowie or wearing mirrored glasses in all situations (mirrored due to the fact that one lens would be clear and one bright red or green). The main idea is that colour blindness is a form of dyslexia with information travelling through both eyes and hitting the brain at the same time. Getting a bit freaked out with so much information at once, the old lobes just try to bluff it and send out dodgy info to the rest of the brain. To fix this, Chromagen tests work out which colour is needed then one eye is covered with that colour so that the information is somehow slowed down through one side. This means that the brain has a millisecond to see one side, work out a theory on the what colour it is before the second eye’s info hits it to confirm the guess. This slight delay seems to give the brain breathing time and improves colour blindness and word-based dyslexia. I opted for the contact and placed my order.

A week later and I returned for the fitting. Having 20/20 vision aside from colour issues, it took me a considerable length of time to get the lens in. Poking yourself in the eye on purpose could not be more wrong.

Anyhow, once it was in and the tears had stopped flowing, the difference was considerable. I’d never realised how weak my depth perception is until I tried this lens. Immediately, the floor seemed to sweep into the distance. I know that sounds like I’ve just broken out the peyote but it really is a unique feeling. Reds were vibrant to the point of fierce with the McDonalds sign feeling as though it was punching me in the retinas. As I wore them that day, I wandered around London, savouring traffic lights, leaves, the blue sky and any primary object I could find. The best way to describe it is that everything looked “popped”. It was as though I was seeing everything as though it was shot on slide film with ultra-saturated vibrancy.

The downside came when I tested the lens in a work environment. The thing that is not explained in the brochures is that despite you suddenly having a broader range of visible colours, depth perception and contrast, it doesn’t help in actually recognising the colours. When I attempted to edit skin tones and subtle casts, I was still just as much in the dark. The primary colour looked lovely and punchy but I never really had issues with these anyway. Tones and hues were as confusing as ever. My brain still couldn’t “get” the differences.

That was about six months ago and despite splashing out on the lens, I admit that it now sits in the bottom of a drawer. It was an interesting experiment but it’s almost like discovering you have the power to fly but however hard you flap, you can only get six inches from the ground. Ultimately, you just end up walking again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm. It is filed under Thoughts and tagged with 20/20, blindness, blue, brown, cantor, chromagen, color, colorblind, colour blind, colourblind, contact lens, disability, editing, green, hue, leon neal, media, news, nissell, optical, photographer, photography, red, tones, vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.