If you are over 65 and have impaired color vision due to cataract yellowing you may want to...

Well I can see that you have a point for your personal situation, but think of it this way: If you've calibrated your display correctly it is now displaying the correct colours, so for example a photo of a scene should look the same as the actual scene itself. That you see this scene with added yellow (depending which eye) still means that your display and the real image should look the same. If you calibrate your display so that it looks 'correct' for your yellow eye, then what will you do about the real world?

FWIW I'm of the opinion that getting gamma correct makes more difference to the image than the colour temperature, since our eyes tend to compensate anyway, especially sat in the dark watching a projector. But poorly adjusted gamma can make the image look flat and have no shadow detail, which regardless of yellow tint, you should still be able to appreciate.

Anyway, glad your cataract operation went well, best of luck for the other eye when/if you get it done.

I think you will naturally adapt to the color change over time, just like you adapted to the change when your cataracts were developing. I went through cataract surgery a couple of years ago and after surgery the difference in colors, both in brightness and color, was immediately obvious. Whites were much brighter and just different than before surgery. However, over time I have adapted to the new vision and everything seems normal now. I researched this at the time, since I was doing a lot of calibrating, and determined I should do nothing except let my body adapt to the changes. This subject has been well documented and one of the best studies I've seen (in that it's easy to understand) is this one. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2633455/ Hope this helps.

Totally agree. Like the OP, I also had right-eye-only cataract surgery (in August of 2009), and saw differences in colors between my eyes at first. But my brain adapted and I don't see the difference anymore. Nothing to sweat over.

You obviously didn't read the article I linked to, as your eyes do adapt and do correct, but not completely. That is, your perception of what you think d65 is versus what it really is changes drastically after the new lens in inserted. However, over time your perception adapts back towards true d65, but not completely. At least that's the way I understand it, and that's what I experienced.

Will it?

If it's accurately reproducing the spectrum, then your eyes get the same stimulus from D65.

Now you may forever perceive D65 as being a bit yellow. But that's D65 from a lighbulb, D65 from sitting in a movie theater, from watching your calibrated TV.

Your perception of D65 may not be consistent with what other people perceive.

That doesn't mean calibration won't make your perception of the TV consistent with other displays also calibrated to D65 or the experience of looking at that same object in similar lighting in the real world.


Calibration still works in giving you a consistent viewing experience, and it would be the same experience you'd get sitting in the colorist booth.

Your argument is similar to saying calibration won't make blind people see.

I'm saying it's not wrong.

Lets say the display once calibrated perfectly it replicates the spectrum produced by sunlight reflecting off a red apple.

Now you see that color as slightly orangish on the display.

But....

You also see it as slightly orangish in real life.

Because your eye issue effects not just your perception of the display, but everything. You have a different reality than the rest of us. That doesn't invalidate calibration. The calibration is still accurate for your reality. The red apple on the park bench and the red apple on your display are the same color for you, even if it isn't the red you remember from your childhood.

How about going really deep?

How do we know if I see red the same way as someone else sees yellow? No one knows what it's like to see through someone else's eyes, so your red could my blue for example. Of course since this is how we have known it all our life so we're used to it.

really? :lol:
the process is done using Instraments and scientific definitions of light.
if it is good enough for the scientists, pondering the true nature of a tree is pointless.
.sotti made a good point.

You've just completely invalidated an entire industry. Everyone throw out your meters and go home.

Well Mark I was about to call you to order items to calibrate my system but I think you jut talked me out of it

Hi Mark,

Have U thought about going monocular..with the "good" eye that is? Just do't get ur hearing checked or you'll be watching movies on an ipad.


It could be worse, depending on your "perspective." I am disabled because of an essentially unheard of complication of a fairly rare eye problem, causing loss of depth perception and micropsia in the "bad eye, for all peripheral images, while the ipsilateral, central vision is absent. Interesting thing is that I can get a 3D perspective, by canting my head to one side and looking at a 2D image. As regards ur and r hue perception ( I liked that one), this seems no different than having a perfectly, so to say, calibrated display and showing it to 10 persons, with nine of them saying,"needs more color and make it brighter." Most are accustomed to more blue and more color saturation, as we know, even with "young," perfect vision. Ur ocular acuity and visual perception, such as it is, at any given point, has a devolving, if U will, ocular acuity, "coloured," by Ur visual perceptive capabilities and experiences.

BTW, I have not gone monocular yet, either.

Thank you very much

Fury

Well said Mark... I was kidding though ill call you tomorrow

The point of calibration isn't to make the color correct for you, it's to make the color objectively the same as the reference standard.

You are confusing your perception of color with actual color accuracy.

My point is those colors are correct.

Your eyes are wrong, but if you were born with those eyes, then calibration would only make the colors look more accurate, more like what you experience in the real world.

It's like you were being forced to view the world with rose-tinted sun glasses.

An uncalibrated display would still look wrong, not like a reference image to you.
A calibrated display would look correct, indistinguishable from the reference image, regardless of the state of your eyes.

That is calibration, the ability to make to things similar.

Your issue is entirely separate and apart from calibration. It was a physical handicap far more similar to deafness or blindness.

You are effectively arguing that increasing fidelity doesn't make a blind man see.
Edited by sotti - 2/6/13 at 7:59pm

Actually that's not true.

Your left eye may very well still behave in a similar manner to the standard observer. Just a standard observer with a big piece of yellow film between you and the colors.

A color matching function, which I'm intimately familiar with, as I gave a talk the SMTPE technical conference last november on the subject, deals with how your cones respond to stimulation. The cones in your eyes did not change, only the the stimulation they receive through your cornea (although technically, much like your ears, your eyes sensitivities change as you age, which is a well documented phenomena, see CIE-2006 color matching functions addendum to compensate for both age and sex).

Further still, I focused most of my responses on the spectral response. Given the same spectrum you are literally receiving exactly the same stimulation to your cones as the original color provided. It would be impossible for you to differentiate the two.

Imagine a world were all of use had the same yellow eyes you had. In that world we would still calibrate our displays to the same D65, since the D65 spectral signature is the most similar to sunlight. The reds, blues and greens used for as primaries for our tri-chromatic vision would be the same, since this disability did not effect the sensitivity of the short, medium and long wave cones of our eyes. Our sensitivity to the different frequencies of light would remain the same. The colors we'd view on monitors, print and in the real world would all look the same and be consistent as long as the colors were accurately calibrated.
Aging eyes have different sensitivities on a cone by cone basis, this is why we started to include color matching functions into CalMAN. Using a spectrometer you can select alternate color matching functions that are being researched as alternatives to the 1931 standard. We don't currently provide for the age modifications to the 2006 CIE function, but we easily could add that.

Of course that is a different topic, than having an actual disability where you are no longer receiving untinted light. Your argument is more akin, to a "The More You Know" commercial urging elderly people to get their eyes checked out.
Edited by sotti - 2/6/13 at 8:19pm

Let's try this.

What color did a real world apple look like sitting on the counter in the kitchen before your surgery?

What color did an apple displayed on your calibrated TV look like before your surgery?

Personally, I don't see any difference between the op's predicament and someone with color-blindness. In either case, the fault is not with color rendition of the display, calibrated or not.

This argument is based on the unproven and potentially false assumption that the new lense is color neutral (and not having a blue bias).

The author is also totally dismissing the most important parts of calibration which are setting the dynamic range,gamma, and luminance of red.

You should, indeed, be able to have an eyeglass lens tinted blue to the degree you need... they do variable tinting all the time from very light blues, yellows, pinks, and who knows what other colors some fashionista might want during any given fashion cycle...

A well-equipped optometric center should have selections of lenses in each tinting color that they offer and the tints will range from the lightest amount of tint they can add to the most/darkest amount. You could simply take those samples and use 1-eye at a time to make your left and right eyes match when you are looking at something under relatively "normal" (close to d65) lighting. Once they know the amount of tint to use, they can order the lens for the left eye tinted that way and you could have either clear or very very very light neutral tint for the right lens. You may have to call a few different places (or possibly you eye doctor can recommend a place with such capabilities).

I'm old enough to be able to receive Social Security if I wish (kind of a waste to not be taking it as soon as possible, who knows if it will even exist in 2 or 5 or 10 years?). My color perception is (according to my $14,000 meter) as good as it has been going back 30 or even 40 years. I worked on imaging systems for 34 years, every one of them relying on some sort of calibration, mostly matching an input to an output, with a video display in the middle that also had to match. So I've been constantly "tested" over the decades at work and since then with my own meter and calibration activities. I'm quite sure I'm not seeing things differently than I did in my 20s... well, the lenses ARE harder and I do need reading glasses (not for a computer screen though... that seems to be the distance the hardened lenses are frozen at! LOL! I have bifocals for driving that have my distance correction applied to the large portion of the lens and the small lower portion is setup with no correction so I can read the instruments easily). I'm hoping I manage to avoid the cataract thing as my blue eyes have always been very sun-sensitive (headaches if I get too much direct sun) and I've worn the darkest sunglasses I can find whenever I'm outside for my entire life. No evidence of cataracts or other issues yet.

As a side note... when I lived in Rochester, NY in the 1990s through 2006, my optometrist was an older guy who had been practicing in Rochester all of his adult life. He understood every cocakamamie request I made (including the bifocals with distance correction above and no correction below) because he would get oddball requests from Kodak employees all the time. So when I asked him for a prescription for single vision lenses corrected to optimize my vision for viewing movies in a movie theater with the screen being 25-50 feet away, he didn't blow it off, he just made a few adjustments to the machine and we went through the better/worse thing several times and in a few minutes I had a prescription for lenses that were ideal for movie viewing in a theater with anti-glare and a high-transmissivity lens. When he didn't balk at that, I asked for another prescription optimized for 7-12 feet viewing (for flat panel TVs and projectors) and had that within another 5 minutes or so. When I've made similar requests of optometrists in Colorado or California they look at me like I have all the Stooges heads on me. When they ask me why I'd want such a thing, my answer has been... because I understand depth of field and there's no such thing as 1 prescription being adequate to optimize vision over the entire range of viewing distances I use every day. They try to cop out by saying that 1 prescription is "good enough" and I always have to say "not for me". I have 20/15 vision when it is properly corrected and I want to take advantage of it as long as I can. I've had to pass on a number of optometrists who wouldn't work with me on getting the prescriptions I wanted in order to find one who was willing to do it (costs extra of course, but it's not that bad, adds maybe 15-20 minutes to an appointment). Anyway... the point is, there are a lot of seniors out there with no vision problems other than hard lenses that won't focus as needed for near/far objects. I'm hoping that if issues do develop, it doesn't happen until I'm into my late 70s at least.

Look for and independent Guild Opticians http://www.oaa.org/index.php as these are the folks that are trained the best and know what they are doing. Like a few that Doug mentioned, I use a mom and pop shop that my parents used before I was born.. which means they have been in business for well over 50 years. You pay a bit more up front but you never pay another dime to have anything fixed or adjusted.. check your state at the site I posted and see if there is someone near you before buying anything.