Am I color blind?

September 21, 2004 11:50 AM

Am I color blind? Because "The Green" looks more brown to me than anything else.

This is a serious question, my dad is color blind, but I always tested as not color blind.

posted by jonah to science & nature (44 comments total)

you might be color weak. looks kinda brownish to me too. And I'm red/green color blind. Also color 'weak' for distinguishing certain other colors as one eye doctor told me.

you may also have your monitor adjusted incorrectly.
posted by darkpony at 11:53 AM on September 21, 2004

It could be the monitor, but it looks generally the same to me on a number of different pictures. Of course, I should probably look at the actual hex for the background to see what it is.... I'm back, it's #426746.
posted by jonah at 11:56 AM on September 21, 2004

Looks distinctly green to me.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 12:02 PM on September 21, 2004

Very green. When I go from the green to the grey, the grey looks lavender.
posted by iconomy at 12:21 PM on September 21, 2004

It's quite green.
posted by rafter at 12:42 PM on September 21, 2004

It's a nice lightish forest green to me. MeTa looks perfectly grey to me... It is #666666 after all. :-D

The lavender effect is probably your eye rods & cones getting tired. You will find the same odd effect from staring at a US/Canadian/France (or any other mostly red and/or blue) flag for a while, then looking at somethign white.
posted by shepd at 12:42 PM on September 21, 2004

What does this look like:

posted by Capn at 12:43 PM on September 21, 2004

What does this look like

What a hooker would wear? (sorry! I couldn't help myself! I'm really trying to help find you an answer! maybe you find hookers dress drably? if so, now you know why we disagree!)
posted by shepd at 12:59 PM on September 21, 2004

Maybe this can help you find out.
posted by frykitty at 1:21 PM on September 21, 2004

it's a dull hunter green for me, but i think that's partially monitor-based...have you adjusted yours lately?
posted by amberglow at 1:25 PM on September 21, 2004

I once created a website for a major environmental non-profit legal organization. I used a green very similar to this one throughout the site. The client's representative insisted that I use a different green, because it was brown on her monitor. Frustrated with this logic, I went to their office and found that she was using a horrible little $100 14" uncalibrated monitor. Logic did not prevail, despite my best efforts, and the whole site was made lime green. Looked great on her monitor.
posted by waldo at 1:36 PM on September 21, 2004

I'm red/green colorblind, and I'd call it "brown", too. But it's distinct from MeFi and MeTa, so I have no problem telling it apart.
posted by tommasz at 1:37 PM on September 21, 2004

On my LCD monitor, looks like ...yeah, like amberglow said, a dull hunter green. Over on the CRT monitor, looks a little richer hue, but not by much.

(Weirdly, I'm blue/purple weak.)
posted by alumshubby at 1:58 PM on September 21, 2004

Capn the left box looks like the background color and the right box looks like a deep navy blue.
posted by jonah at 2:22 PM on September 21, 2004

frykitty Both of the tests on that page seem to say that I have normal vision. It could be monitor issues, but I notice the same thing on a 21" CRT as I do on a 15" laptop.
posted by jonah at 2:26 PM on September 21, 2004

Uhm... that doesn't look deep navy blue to me, it's light burgundy. Oh god maybe I'm colorblind!
posted by Stan Chin at 2:42 PM on September 21, 2004

It could be because of the black border, but the green box looks darker than the Green. And in comparison to the other colors on the page, the box next to it looks purple to me. Darker or lighter shades depending on the angle of my LCD.
posted by emelenjr at 2:51 PM on September 21, 2004

I'd be interested to see if you could find something defined as brown that you thought matched this color.

By the light color (RGB) percentages, it's:
27.6% red
43.1% green
29.2% blue

So that's a dark (all less than 50%),
gray (only a 14-16% difference between colors),
green, but definitively green.

If you up the red quite a bit and keep the others the same, you get brown.
posted by davebug at 2:55 PM on September 21, 2004

the right box looks like a deep navy blue.

That box is most definately not navy blue.
posted by falconred at 3:02 PM on September 21, 2004

Agreed. Burgundy (and green, a wee bit darker than the Green).
posted by penguin pie at 3:36 PM on September 21, 2004

yup. a darker, richer green, and burgundy on the right.
posted by amberglow at 3:48 PM on September 21, 2004

I should explain I guess. The left box is AxMe Green, and right box is that colour, but with the red and green elements reversed.
posted by Capn at 5:00 PM on September 21, 2004

Um... the green in Capn's image is exactly the same as The Green. That's the way it looks to me. You people seeing a darker (richer?) green are being fooled by the border.

[On preview: Told ya!]
posted by mrgavins at 5:03 PM on September 21, 2004

uhm, over here the capn's green is clearly NOT the same. It's darker, and it's not a border artifact. Here's a screen shot:



Mac PB in Safari, FWIW. And the right square is a burgundy color. Mmmm, burgundy.
posted by mwhybark at 5:29 PM on September 21, 2004

No definitely not the same green:

• AskMe Green: #426746
• capn's Green: #315434

I ? xScope
posted by nathan_teske at 5:46 PM on September 21, 2004

Heh, I like how I assumed automatically that it wasn't "navy blue" but was *really* burgundy, unlike Stan Chin's reaction.
posted by bonaldi at 5:52 PM on September 21, 2004

(I'd say maroon instead of burgundy, but whatever)

If you want to check this website against color blindness, this is what you need.

If AxMe is brown you have protanopia (red/gree color blindness), I'm sorry to report. Or a broken monitor.
posted by shepd at 6:33 PM on September 21, 2004

Burgundy to me should be more red, and maroon more brown than that square on the right. But I've been known to misinterpret very similar shades of light green and tan.
posted by emelenjr at 6:55 PM on September 21, 2004

mwhybark:


Capn:


WTF?

Furthermore, Gimp claims that Capn's image has the same green as AskMe, but that mwhybark's quoted-Capn doesn't.

(Askme looks green to me at home, but had a brownish tinge on the LCD screen at work.)
posted by kenko at 7:03 PM on September 21, 2004

Ok, at home, the right side looks burgundy. The left side still looks the same as the background though, except in the screen shot. The screen shot looks darker. Weird.
posted by jonah at 8:08 PM on September 21, 2004

maybe it's a windows/mac thing? mine looks just like Capn's screensnap, not yours, kenko.
posted by amberglow at 8:08 PM on September 21, 2004

p.s. I'm viewing the site on Moz Firefox, WinXP.
posted by jonah at 8:09 PM on September 21, 2004

oop-mwhybark's.
posted by amberglow at 8:09 PM on September 21, 2004

I assume you're using a Mac, amberglow? On Windows at work I saw Capn's shot as having the same green on both sides, and I see the same green on both sides with Capn's shot at home on Linux.

Conclusion: both nathan_teske's xScope and mwhybark's ENTIRE COMPUTER are defective.
posted by kenko at 8:23 PM on September 21, 2004

whybark has ColorSync support turned on in his browser, probably.
posted by kindall at 8:33 PM on September 21, 2004

Well, I guess we've all learned an important lesson today. A lesson about interperting colours on different computers. About men, and about women. About life, and about hope. I hope we can all walk away from this better people.
posted by Capn at 8:53 PM on September 21, 2004

OH GOD I CAN'T SEE!!!
posted by Stan Chin at 8:58 PM on September 21, 2004

whybark has ColorSync support turned on in his browser, probably.

That's probably right. On FireFox (on OS X) the green in the box looks the same as the background color but in Safari it looks different.
posted by gyc at 9:01 PM on September 21, 2004

i'm mac. in safari it looks just like mwhybark's, and in netscape and opera too.
posted by amberglow at 5:20 AM on September 22, 2004

I bet you Capn is changing the image every 15 minutes just to keep this thread going. I've never trusted pirates...
posted by mrgavins at 7:34 AM on September 22, 2004

No definitely not the same green:

Funnily enough, if I mask the borders with my fingers, it does suddenly look the same shade of green. I'm sure there's a Simon and Garfunkel song about this kind of thing...if we all see colours differently does it really matter, man? Can't we all just love each other?

Now. Who knows about getting sticky finger marks off monitors?
posted by penguin pie at 8:16 AM on September 22, 2004

mwhybark:Never trust Macs with your colors. All mac browsers take your colors and maul them in irrational ways. I commented about it to a friend a while ago; it's not like their monitors can't handle it, it's as if they have a function to pastellize everything before it hits the screen.
posted by abcde at 9:04 AM on September 22, 2004

Actually, the way Macs maul colors is wholly rational. It's probably saying "Oh, this PNG is in PC gamma, I'd better darken it so it looks correct, since my gamma is brighter." This is actually the right thing to do since PNG stores the creating system's gamma in the file. It makes the image look the same on the Mac and the PC. Indeed, if I open Capn's PNG with Photoshop and turn off color proofing, it matches The Green exactly.

The trouble is, Safari doesn't adjust the HTML background color in the same way. It really should, because HTML is I believe defined to be in the sRGB colorspace, but that would confuse Mac Web designers too much because it would make all their colors a lot darker than they expected. Thus, The Green is (normally) lighter on the Mac than on the PC.

If Capn had used a GIF or a JPEG this wouldn't have happened. :)
posted by kindall at 10:08 AM on September 22, 2004

mwhybark's screenshot is what I see on my monitor (Viewsonic/IE6).

The finger block trick thingie makes Capn's graphic look closer to The Green but the graphic is still darker.
posted by deborah at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2004