Color is one of the hardest things to see and understand. I was really worried when a teacher asked me the color of a cola can … Of course I answered that it was red, but he reminded me that we will never know if two people will see exactly the same tone. Everything gets complicated if you suffer from color blindness. This GIMP palette accommodates color blind vision.
Color is a mystery. It depends on many factors and the way of representing it is adapted to an ideal vision. If you have problems perceiving color, some programs offer a series of aids to correct color vision. A kind of glasses that I do not know if they really work.
In Adobe Photoshop we have to go to the menu Vision> Test fit> Color blindness to view the files with the adapted color. If we experiment with the famous can of cola, I see a slightly greenish tone.
This is also possible in GIMP, the free editor par excellence, thanks to the work of Øyvind Kolås.
Color correction for the color blind
It is difficult to think how others will see the color. So seeing it with the absence of any tone is more difficult. I cannot imagine a world without seeing my reds, my greens or my blues … So it is a wonder that you think about this problem and try to solve it.
There are many types of color blindness, but the most common are:
- Deuteranopia: do not see green tones.
- Protanopia: they do not see the red tones.
- Tritanopia: they do not see the blue tones.
What Øyvind Kolås has achieved is to create a palette of 16 colors that give enough contrast for the most common variations of color blindness and apply it in GIMP. This palette is based on the CGA / ANSI palette, the basic color standard created by IBM in the early 1980s.
It is very modest, but it is a breakthrough in getting everyone to be able to see color in a standard way. It can also be easily adapted to the sRGB space.
Surely many photographers and designers will find it useful. For those of us who perceive color without problem, because we have done the Ishihara card test, it will help us to get an idea of a different world.