• Question: Do we see everything the right couler or do we see things wrong. Example ( people that are couler blind is that the true couler of everything and we see things wrong )

    Asked by KaiF to James, Joe on 20 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 20 Mar 2015:

      Hi KaiF,

      That is a wonderful question! Colour is caused by the type of light that is reflected by a surface. These colours vary, as in the colours in the rainbow. If you see something that is white it is reflecting a full spectrum of light, if something is coming out blue, you are seeing just blue light emitted.

      By and large, everyone who is not colour blind will see colours the same, most of the time. However as the recent social media storm over “The Dress” has shown, colour is also seen due to people’s perception. Depending on how your eyes are adjusted to background lighting can also impact what colours you pick up from a surface, the background lighting acting as interference, like static on a non-digital TV or radio. This interference altered how people saw The Dress and what colour it was.

      If people are colour blind, they can not process that frequency of light reflected off a surface, so they see no colour, just an area of light. I wouldn’t say they see the true colour, but in fact no colour.

    • Photo: Joe Spencer

      Joe Spencer answered on 20 Mar 2015:

      ^ the dress thing made so much fuss 😛
      It’s hard to answer, we do perceive colours differently as everyone is unique, but what we’re told is blue, we’ll see as blue and call blue. Colour blind people find it hard to distinguish colours or they look the same. Again it’s actually hard to measure as since our eyes deliver information to our brains, and interprets that, it’s up to our own brains interpretation of what colours really are. So in terms of a philosophical answer, no humans cannot ever be sure what we perceive as colour is the same.
      On the other hand, computers can, light is made up of wavelength’s and energies of light, and computers can ‘see’ a colour and turn it to numbers, so whatever that number is is the colour the object is, what colour you see it to be is up to you.

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