Interesting pics of how dogs actually see colors - link-

[old mark]

Dogs see colors using 2 color receptors, not the 3 we have, and the results are shown in the pics at this link. Dogs have a greater field of vision - around the sides of their head-than us and are much better than we are at seeing movement. We see more detail.
Very interesting to me - I have often wondered about this stuff. Link:

http://premiumblend.net/2009/08/21/how-dogs-see-colors/


Hope this is interesting to someone else here.

mark

[Soylent Brice]

1. that's weird. but neat. thanks for sharing.

[WolverineDG]

2. wow!

thanks for sharing that! Looks like they can see most colors, except for shades of red.

dg

[old mark]

3. They are blind to red, but they see it as other colors - kind of grey-green. nt

[mnhtnbb]

8. Wow. Red is my favorite color; I can't imagine not being able to see it.

[old mark]

13. Wouldn't be your favorite if you had never seen it....nt

[yawnmaster]

16. your favorite would be whatever the perceived color of that which gives you the...

same emotion that red gives you now. But you would not have a good understanding of what red means.
(assuming you were born not being able to see red).
Maybe whatever you perceive as the color of a sunset would become your favorite,
or whatever color you see when you cut your finger, or the color you see when you look at a nice smelling rose.
you have to try to imagine not being able to see it, but imagine never having seen it.

[undeterred]

4. That's interesting...

I have a friend who swears his lab barks at cars that are red... there must be some other factor!

[old mark]

5. They do see something, and they don't know they are not seeing reds -

evidently some animals can see more colors than humans can, but we don't seem to feel the lack.

mark

[jmowreader]

22. Red cars don't just reflect red light

They reflect all colors--everything does--just more red than the other colors. Also, cars have black parts, silver parts, glass...the dog can see the car fine.

[yawnmaster]

6. I showed those pictures to my dog, to explain how I see more colors than he...

and he said, "what are you talking about, those pictures look the same. You see colors just like I do."

[hunter]

10. My parrot considers me tone deaf and color blind.

She won't even look at the television with it's soupy brown lackluster color rendition and muffled sound. I think it disgusts her.

[old mark]

12. See? He's a dog - what does he know? nt

[yawnmaster]

14. not only that but he claims to smell better than me...

and I know that is just not true.

[old mark]

17. So, how long has he been talking back to you? nt

[yawnmaster]

18. Ever since he learned to talk, of course! He was just a pup. eom

[UTUSN]

7. Fantastic. So basically they see what we do without the colors. n/t

[hunter]

9. I've played a bit with color perception...

It's not so simple as saying how color blind people (or dogs) might see color. No matter what our color perception kit is we all think things are the color we see, and that's not the case. Skin tones are skin tones, fur colors are fur colors, and blood is blood, no matter the specific sensitivities of one's color receptors.

The problem with imaging colors as a dog "sees" them is exactly the same problem we might have imaging what a bird might see. Birds tend to have tetrachromacy and a much more logical spread of color receptors than ours. Human red and green receptors are an evolutionary kludge since our ancestors scurrying around in the dark of night dumped two of the finely tuned receptors birds and many reptiles kept, which left apes like us to make do with a cheap and dirty splitting of the red-green receptor we had remaining to achieve a second rate kind of trichromacy again. (Intelligent Design? I think not unless you believe in a lazy or malicious creator...)

When converting pictures to what another person or animal with a different color perception kit might see you must always take into account the primary subject of the picture. If it's a person's face you are trying to depict you might, for example, fix the skin tone so it is the same in both pictures and then modify the other colors into some correspondence with the color response of the "color blind" person who's vision you are trying to portray. You can also do a similar sort of mapping in the other direction, to give someone with trichromacy a slight insight into the world of tetrachromats like birds.

[yawnmaster]

11. This is exactly why we need color perception standards...

And until we have them, inter-species communication will just not be at its full potential.

[old mark]

15. I know for many years, people thought dogs saw no colors at all...

I'd be very interested it trying to imagine what birds see that we can't..

mark

[yawnmaster]

19. I think we can try to understand beyond trichromacy by splitting the spectrum...

temporally. Of course, this means we can only look at static images and combine them in our mind.
If we want dynamic images, we will need to limit what we are looking at.
And at best, it will only show the human unperceived colors as falsely colored.
Of course it can be of use, as when falsely coloring an ultraviolet image of a flower, to show us what is of interest to an insect, for instance.

[hunter]

21. Astronomers do a lot color spectrum translation.

It's not so easy getting that kind of spectrum data in everyday photography. I can grab any RGB color image off the internet and convert it to "dog-o-vision" but where do I get color photographs approximating a bird's color vision? My digital camera won't do that.

That's not something I've experimented with yet. I'd like a digital camera that takes pictures my parrot would appreciate:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

[yawnmaster]

23. by removing a filter we can broaden the red response into the infrared...

Towards the ultraviolet is more difficult and may require a special camera.
But if we could expand into the ultraviolet, we would have the spectrum covered.
We'd have to deconvolve the image to convert from the rgb colorspace to whatever colorspace we want to work in.
Of course, since we only can see using the three colors, we are still at a disability to truly appreciate what your parrot sees,
and all we can do is try and understand it better.

[Lionel Mandrake]

24. Color vision is very interesting.

The genes for long and medium wavelength cones are carried by the X chromosome in humans.

There is evidence that some women who are carriers for color vision anomalies see more different colors than the rest of us do. That makes sense, because they have more than three types of cones in their retinas. There is speculation that they may have tetrachromacy, but no real evidence of this as far as I know.

We men, with only one X chromosome per cell, are chromatically challenged (on the average) compared to women. If the advantages that some women enjoy outweigh the deficiencies that some men suffer, that might explain the relatively high fraction (5-10%) of genes for anomalous color vision in human populations. (This reasoning is analogous to the usual explanation for the high incidence of sickle cell trait where malaria is common.)

[dysfunctional press]

20. when i through the orange rubber ball and there are leaves on the ground...

our lab can have a hard time finding it. it can really be funny watching her just going nuts, and the ball is only two feet from her.

this isn't one of those times:

[Shell Beau]

25. That is so weird. Red can signal danger in the wild for most, yet

the dog doesn't see it. I always wonder how we really know what animals can see, but it is so fascinating to see how animals live instinctively. There has to be a reason why dogs are color blind, so to speak. I guess they just really rely on their smell and hearing to get them along.

[old mark]

27. They do see motion better than we do, and have a much greater field of vision - nt

[noamnety]

26. How cats see color