Colorblind vs Photography

dhornick wrote in post #18136823
I don't think I've ever heard of a case when it just showed up. It's hereditary so I'm sure you had it since birth. I was 6 (50 yrs ago) when mine first came to light. I was in school and we were told to color the American Flag. I colored it wrong and was sent to the Principles office where I immediately received 10 smacks with the paddle for defacing the American Flag. My parents we're not happy.

Mine showed up in second grade. Half way through the year, I started coloring the trees green and the leaves brown. My parents were called in for a teacher/parent conference. It was at that time I was given the opportunity to view those little circles with the hidden numbers in them.

We figured out that the crayons had worn down enough that the labels have been peeled off so I couldn't read which crayon to use when.

dhornick wrote in post #18136823
I was in school and we were told to color the American Flag. I colored it wrong and was sent to the Principles office where I immediately received 10 smacks with the paddle for defacing the American Flag.

That is so many kinds of wrong! How many smacks did the principal get? Of course, I already know.

Back in the dark ages of manipulating digital images on personal computers color management could be a real nightmare. Many things were literally just being made up as we went along, true best practices were often vague and nebulous, usually being tweaked at every different print house and design shop.

Everyone worth a damn would first work to get pleasing color to they eye and then without fail, check RGB values and CMYK ink densities to insure what they were viewing on the screen made sense. I was able to read the numbers fairly well for a few key things, I knew some that could really go nuts with just about any color under the sun.

Photoshop's info pallet and the color sampling tool should be your new best friend. You can change the values to CMYK for a more intuitive way to "see" the colors. I'm guessing Pantone still makes a CMYK book, it might be a nice reference as well. I assure you that with some effort and googling you will be able to find a way to improve your color correction skills. I've seen really messed up images color corrected on black and white monitors.

Gotta get my boys taken care of, and I've been busy as hell lately, but I'll try to dig up some more resources for you in the coming days. I know I have discussed color blindness at least once before here, if not more. You might be able to dig up some good info with a forum search.

My son is a photographer who is terribly color blind, says he mostly see shades of gray so fall colors are nothing to get excited about. He shoots great color images of models and his B&W are REALLY nice.

If you're handed lemons, make lemonade!

One very successful photographer that is color blind is Joel Grimes. His work is awesome.