Can a color blind person succeed in photography?

[victormora]

I am a very enthusiast amateur photographer. I have been exploring photography for three years now and would like

to take a more serious aproach, maybe even try to go pro. Just one problem: I am color blind (daltonism). The

kind of daltonism I have is the least serious one, called anomalous trichromacy, wich means I have a really hard

time distinguishing shades of red and brown with green.

 

I love taking photographs, and will continue anyway, but i would like to know your opinion, experience or advice

about this genetic disorder and my passion for photography.

 

Thanks

[tibz]

Yes. I met a color blind photographer and some of his work was amazing. He only needed some help in final color balancing from his wife. Just have fun and go take pictures. That's all that matters.

[graybrick]

I think in most cases composition is much more important than color in a shot. Of course, a lot of my work is black and white, or cross-processed slide film, so I'm not big on literal color reproduction anyway. I'd say that if it looks good from your perspective then it is, and your color discrimination won't slow you down a bit. Good luck.

[joshroot]

Echo what Nicholas says (minus the part about knowing a colorblind photog). Might take a little extra work and another set of eyes on the final proof (depending on the image) but you should be fine.

 

The easy suggestion to make would be that your color blindness shouldn't have much affect on black&white photography. Though I don't know enough about being color blind to know if I'm just saying things or not.

 

I'd be very interested in seeing what you come up with and hearing about any challenges and solutions you encounter. Might make an interesting article for photo.net.

[brucecahn]

The obvious option is to shoot B&W only. I do that even though I can see color.

[aplumpton]

Victor, I may be way off base in the following, but do you want to provide images of objects that appear as you see them, or as others do?

If the former is important, maybe you can have the red, green and brown values altered to make the result for others

comply with what you see (post-production edit). If, on the other hand, you want to visualise the objects as others would see them, maybe

there are some viewing filters that might compensate for your eyesight (pre-visualisation filter?).

 

Either may be difficult to achieve. I do not know what resources might b available.

 

Also, my reasoning may also be suspect.

 

In black and white photography, seeing in colour during the previsualsation of an image is fairly important in order to predict the effect of

colour filters, but I suspect that having your condition would be less problematic if your interest was to make B&W images. However B&W

is not everyone's interest.

 

Nicholas is probably right. Everyone appreciates colour and its effects differently, and your situation may well be a plus in

creative compositions in colour.

[ted_springer]

Yes. I know a girl who is an excellent photographer who is color blind. It will force you to do color by numbers in photoshop

(which is a good thing).

[yann1]

I'm color blind just like you, I see the grass in the sun orange, can't always distinguish brown from red...The thing I always avoid is to change the color (hue) of a photo using the computer. Being color blind, means we may have another way of seeing things, it could be a plus. Personally I prefer black and white, but I like the look of Fuji Velvia for the colors. By the way, I've always wondered: Was Van Gogh was color blind, or did he pretended to be color blind ?

[jpo3136b]

Yes. In fact, you may find it easier to succeed in some forms of web page design; photos that support web pages, for

example. I once met a woman who was almost totally color blind. She had a form so severe, her view of the world was

almost a monochrome scheme, with lots of yellows and browns but very little red and green as most people seem to see

it.

 

You may find this web page interesting. This guidance, published by Microsoft, shows that the world's major

corporations are making an effort to build web pages and advertisements that look good to people with a wide range of

color perceptions.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb263953.aspx

 

Similar searches for terms like "color blind web page" might reveal other resources you might find helpful.

 

Some form of color blindness is present to some degree in most people. It would be, I think, abnormal to have a full and

perfect range of color vision. Everyone has their quirks. No one should get stuck with thinking their way through a

problem because of some trouble with their body. Working on a broad range of access to information will not only help

you to take the high road, morally, it might also help to improve the situation and make your work more marketable. You

can find a way to turn this to your advantage. Good luck. J.

[victormora]

Thanks for your advice and encouragement. I can do pretty good BW photos (as a matter of fact these are the ones i enjoy the most) and my "perspective on color" has been complimented by friends, teachers and photographers. The real hard time I have is getting skin colors right, thats the reason why I stay clear of color portraits.

 

I guess I can stick to BW and do color ocassionally. It can get a tiny bit frustrating trying to express yourself through photography when you see things quite differently from regular folk. But again that is what art is all about: showing people your view of the world.

[ambers-photos]

My daughter is vision impaired and she is 11 and love to take photos shes not blind but her vision is 800/400 she just uses a point and shoot with a big display and im sure its hit or miss but she sees things here way heres is an example of her "work" lol she seems to like a lot of contrast with color and light

 

 

Amber<div></div>

[joseph_wisniewski]

If you go to a little trouble, you can get perfect skin tones without ever having to look at the color.

 

0) Shoot digital, shoot raw, and use either Lightroom 2 or Photoshop CS2, 3, or 4.

 

1) Avoid lenses known for "color casts". You can get other photographers to help you with this step. You only have to do this once.

 

2) Shoot a Gretag Macbeth "ColorChecker" chart at the start of a session, and again with every change of lighting (i.e. from strobes to tungsten, or outdoors when moving from sunlight to shade). The ColorChecker has 24 squares, 18 of which are specially formulated paints that correspond to the color responses of different common colored objects (skin tones, plant green and brown tones, cosmetic and clothing dyes, etc).

 

3) In Lightroom, use the new "DNG Profile Editor" (a free add-on) to generate a "camera profile" for each of the conditions, and apply that profile to every shot taken under those conditions. This is simpler than it sounds, literally about 5 minutes per change of condition. For a portrait shoot under studio lights, once may be all you need for years with a set of lights. Do not let the name "DNG Profile Editor" scare you off, this doesn't force you to convert all your images to DNG and accept all the horrid problems of a DNG workflow, the profiles are perfectly usable in a camera manufacturer raw workflow. (I think the name is an attempt by Adobe to get the world thinking of DNG as "useful").

 

In PhotoShop, use the PictoColor "inCamera" tool (about a $100 add-on) to do pretty much the same thing you'd do in lightroom with the DNG profile editor.

 

4) When PhotoSHopping, as Ted says, working "by the numbers" can be good. But you have to work with the "right" numbers. use the HSL or LAB display mode in the "info" window and for entering colors in the "color picker" for brushes and fills, instead of RGB.

 

RGB means you have to work ugly ratios to figure out what the right color is (i.e. "average Asian skin has red about 13% higher than green, blue 17% lower than green). LAB or HSL will give you color numbers that you can learn: in both of those systems, L stands for "lightness", and you can throw "lightness" away for most color work. So HSL and LAB let you view AB (red/green and yellow/blue) or HS (hue and saturation) separate from lightness. So you can learn to "sanity check" your color, a healthy Asian is about 33 degrees hue, 24% saturation, or A=18, B=22, and there are no ratios or percentages to screw with. This works for all ethnic groups and subcategories within those groups, so you can quickly learn that Nordic type Caucasians have one set of AB values when they're winter pale, another for moderately tanned, another for nicely bronzed, etc...

 

I actually have a little HS list taped to the left side of my monitor, 20 skin tones, reasonable sky and grass values, along with about 40 of my favorite PS and LR key shortcuts. Amazing what you can fit in an 18 inch tall, 1 inch wide strip of paper. I have yet to design a strip for the right side or top, and the bottom is where the post-it notes live...

 

4a) The steps to this point will result in you having "accurate" color. As photographers who play with gold reflectors, warming filters, blue tinted "white balance" cards, etc. know, sometimes "accurate" isn't what sells. Have a photographer with good color sense set you up some PhotoShop hue/saturation presets to go from "accurate" to a couple of different kinds of "pleasing".

 

5) Print to a properly profiled device. Either have decent profiles made for your printer, or send the images out to be printed by someone who properly color manages his system.

 

You'll have better color than 90% of the photographers that can actually see color.

[joseph_wisniewski]

Amber,

 

Decades ago, I rigged up a talking light meter, darkroom exposure meter, and darkroom timer for a totally bling (not just "legally" blind) photographer. He used to print with some process that resulted in a very swelled, then hardened gelatin that he could "feel" in bas-relief. I think he also used to gum print. He used to "walk" scenes to work on composition, and had an interesting sense of portraiture...

 

These days, I can imagine a blind photographer with digital, automatic exposure, and an inkjet loaded with something that would print directly in bas-relief.

[zac_sanders]

I saw a thing on the news about a totally blind photographer who succeeded and his work was pretty good he had a helper though.

[maris_rusis]

I use a Wratten number 90 viewing filter to make myself colour blind when shooting black and white. It is a big help.

[dave_s]

A lot of males have red-green color blindness. It's genetic, carried on the X chromosome, and it affects about 1 in 20 of us. In my dissolute youth, when I hung around snooker halls, there were color blind guys around who were perennially scratching (fouling) on the brown ball, because they thought it was a red.

 

Having said all this, have any of the greats of photography been color-blind? If so, who?

[summitar]

I am red-green color blind. The best way I know how to describe it is that I can't tell the difference between the caution light and the red light. I can identify the primary colors. I suggest that you either go into BW photography or not consider the professional path.

 

Sorry. it kept me out of pilot training, although I was a thousand times more qualified than a moron like j. sidney mccain.

[tonmestrom]

Dave, you gave the correct answer although the percentage of males that is to some extent colourblind is in fact a lot higher. In most cases it doesn't pose a practical problem however.

[dave_s]

Ton, it's a sterile argument because the gene frequency varies in different populations, but you made me look it up

because I was curious. Yanoff's textbook says 2 - 6% of males.

[tonmestrom]

Dave, I was trained as a nurse and once I got lessons from an eye surgeon. He told me that up to 80% of males are colourblind to a certain extent. Whatever the percentage however it's clear that for most people it isn't an impairment in daily life or even photographing.

[will_daniel1]

In the 1980s I worked for a large consumer photofinishing lab. Our color started slipping, and the plant manager had to investigate what the heck was going on. Weeks went by; nothing. Then one day someone suggested giving a color-blindness test to the newly promoted QC manager. You guessed it -- embarrassment all around. They found the QC guy a different job in the plant because he was a valued employee. I don't think he even knew he was color blind until he took that test.

 

Will

[matthew_newton]

Hey Will, I have heard similar stories before. To me the most interesting is when you post a color blindness test on a large web forum. Its amazing the number of people who find out for the first time that they are color blind and didn't realize it after 20+ years of life.

 

I had a friend from high school who wanted to become an MP in the Airforce and was washed out because he turned out to be color blind which he didn't realize. He is now an MP in the Army. Apparently in the Air Force just about any job requires correct color vision.

[dave_s]

<i>Dave, I was trained as a nurse and once I got lessons from an eye surgeon.</i>

<p>

Sounds like you have the authoritative information then. Yanoff is only a major textbook of ophthalmology.

[tonmestrom]

I wasn't starting a p contest which should be clear when you read the rest of my comment

[bernie moore]

Did not some photog say,"Color is the enemy of composition"? Perhaps someone with a better memory than mine will recall to whom the credit belongs.