"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...

Peter Wensberg, a vice-president at Polaroid, reported that Dr Land ran
the
entire book of color-perception charts past him, and said he was the first
person he'd met who failed every one. Whether this meant Mr Wensberg could
not see color at all, I don't know. But he couldn't /distinguish/ them
very
well.

A co-worker once asked me to help with selecting colors for a page he was
designing. It turned out he had red-green problems. I showed him a
fluorescent-green pen. "What color does that look like to you?" "Orange".
I
don't know what "orange" looked like to him, but he couldn't distinguish
that green from orange.



I have an hypothesis that I wish there were a way to explore. Whereas a
given color of light (or what we call a color) is a definate wavelength, and
therefore a constant.... BUT.. is human perception of colors universal? ie
we know when we are seeing "red" (~650nm) because that's what we LEARNED to
call the color we see as red. Does this necessarily mean that we are all
perceiving the same hue, or do we each see something a bit different, but we
all call it the same thing?

As a totally out of the park example: let's say you and your friend are
looking at a stopsign. You both know that the sign is "red". But perhaps
what you see is more of an orange, whilst your friend sees something more
like yellow. As a subjective appearance, the difference in color perception
would be "normal" to the viewer, whereas were the two of you to "swap"
perceptions, the world around you would look quite strange.

It may sound like a very offbeat idea, but when you think about it, most
sensors have a skew in one direction or another: no two cameras register
color exactly the same.

Just another strange thought to ponder..