“Colour Blindness Simulator” or how to see photographs like never before

If you ever have the curiosity of how exactly a color blind person sees the world around them, don’t make the very uninspired move of asking them. Because they haven’t had a time when they were not color blind, so how can they explain differences to you? Instead, you can try “Colour Blindness Simulator”, an application that will let you answer your own question by experiencing it yourself.

Photo showing normal vision (first picture) and three stages of color blindness, namely protanopia, dueteranopia and tritanopia, from left to right.

Color blindness. What’s that about?

Color blindness, a condition that affects about 5% of the population, is the inability to perceive colors correctly or, in some cases, to see any colors at all. The three major types of color blindness are monochromacy, dichromacy and anomalous trichromacy. The “mono” in “monochromacy” speaks for itself: the person with this type of color blindness has the world present itself like a black and white film. But what about the other two? How does someone explain them in a simple way? With the use of images, of course, and this is why “Colour Blindness Simulator” comes in so handy.

Hop on the color blind express!

Sure, it’s not the most appealing invitation at first sight, but when “Color Blindness Simulator” launches it, it’s hard to decline. And this is because, not only does it satisfy our curiosity about perception under this condition, but it lets us choose what exactly we want to see through the eyes of a color blind. And this is especially interesting for photographers, who now have the opportunity to know how a color blind sees their photos.

So what is “Colour Blindness Simulator”? It is an application developed by Etre, that will allow the user to upload photographs from their computer and view them as a color blind would, in the type of condition of their choice. It should be a 1000×1000 image and should not exceed 100kb.

Color blindness fun fact: some studies suggest that, with some types of color blindness, people can distinguish colors that those with normal color vision cannot distinguish. Interesting, huh?