Color Acuity Test

How accurate is your color vision? Find out here. I found this test to be pretty difficult but then again I'm 50 and my eyesight is poor. I did notice after I had eye damage that I couldn't distinguish between green and yellow as well as before. My test scores pointed out that as an area of weakness for me.

The lower your score - the better. Zero is perfect color vision.

Thanks Jenn...that was fun...haven't taken one since college...I love colors!!!

I was shocked I scored so well (16) - given my wonky vision. I guess my color distinction is better than my actual vision!

I guess I also didn't know just how much more prevalent impaired color vision was amongst men than it is in women.

I scored a 38. I have cataracts now so i think that maybe makes it harder to distinguish more subtle ranges even though I have always worked with close color ranges in weaving and other fiber work.
I've never tried something like that before...it was was fun and now I need to go stretch my neck a bit from peering at the screen for so long.

Yeah - that test was HARD for me. And cataracts would definitely NOT help. 38 is a really decent score!

Long ago and far away, my mother and I used to do interior design (my mother is also a watercolorist) - color and distinguishing subtle hue differences was part of the job description. I find it so much more challenging as I age and my vision deteriorates. Meh.

I've showed this to the DH before. He's a color vision scientist. He says not to feel badly if you do poorly, as the test is greatly dependent on your monitor's accurate rendition of colors. As a photog, I can tell you that very few monitors have accurate color. It's fun, but it's no diagnosis.

@Jennifer, they say 1 in 8 males has some color deficiency. That does not explain all of their difficulties in matching clothes, however.

Ann Torrence wrote:I've showed this to the DH before. He's a color vision scientist. He says not to feel badly if you do poorly, as the test is greatly dependent on your monitor's accurate rendition of colors. As a photog, I can tell you that very few monitors have accurate color. It's fun, but it's no diagnosis.

That's a really good point on the monitors. And wow - didn't even know there was such a thing as a color vision scientist! That's pretty interesting.

Ann Torrence wrote:@Jennifer, they say 1 in 8 males has some color deficiency. That does not explain all of their difficulties in matching clothes, however.

I've always thought they should make adult "Granimals" for men - remember those clothes for kids? Kids could match the animals on the clothing and know that if they picked a zebra and a zebra, they would match.

I seemed to score badly with the greens, but then there are a few men with colour blindness in the family so I might be a carrier. Do carriers have worse scores?

I seconds Ann's point in a huge way!

This is a "very rough" check and if you score above fifty, you should see an eye doctor or neurologist to see if more is going on with your "rod and cone" color preceptors. I have shared a few times here at permies that color perception seem to effect certain folks accuracy for nature viewing, tracking career choices, etc. I have to "color" what some musicians have to "sound"...perfect pitch...(if you don't mind the expression) as I have never scored higher than 10 on these...even with a crappy laptop monitor. Everyone should take it again in the morning after resting, and this time use your "skater vision." You can improve on these test and even start a shift in your visual cortex by exercising it.

The real tests give you all those huge range test (like this one,) plus shapes, numbers, and letters, all in a dot matrix field. Some even have mazes to follow which change in hue and texture as well. This one is a "rough guide" and for fun. Some paint stores use them (as do teachers) just to see what they are dealing with in their clients. I see things much differently than most folks..because of this color perception "thingy" and apparently it can affect your psychology as well if it changes over time. A very fascinating subject of study...Thanks again Jennifer...

I got a 99. They say a 0 is better? I don't get it??

So A higher number is bad?

Hmmm.....yes, a higher number indicates less color acuity - It almost sounds as if you took the test in reverse! Did you do as they indicated and use the colors on either end of the scale as the starting colors for test? Or did you just put them in order as you saw fit?

Like Ann stated, because this is on a computer - all sorts of wonkiness can ensue.

Hi Miles, Take it again when you are rested. Anything above 50 (for this type) suggest "profound color blindness." Some folks see in black and white, yet may a have "GREAT" tonal and shade perception, and the only time they get "hung up" is when those tones and shades are in the same color spectrum and range. One of my students has a degree in photography, is an incredible artist-photographer, than free lances most successfully. They would score around 50 to 70...of course their best work is in "black and white," and shadowing..

Have you been tested before?

Jennifer Wadsworth wrote:
I've always thought they should make adult "Granimals" for men - remember those clothes for kids? Kids could match the animals on the clothing and know that if they picked a zebra and a zebra, they would match.

Granimals! I forgot all about them!

I once worked for a prof that bought only blue coats, beige or grey slacks, etc. It would have worked as a fashion failure regulator, except one day in class he was vigorously erasing the chalkboard. Eraser flew up, hit him on the back. He wore his eraser print for a week before his wife wrestled the coat away to the cleaners.

Have asked for some data from DH on the variability of numbers of red vs green cones in individual humans. He has a cool slide from one of his talks.

@Miles, if you really scored 99, you might want to see a professional. Color blindness isn't rare, but that score would be something special. An academic practitioner might put you in a psychophysics experiment or two if you aren't careful.

I got a 20. Most of my errors were in that funny blue/green area. I know that one of my eyes picks up different hues than the other. I noticed that if you tilt the screen a bit in either direction you can spot some differences easier. I wonder if I looked at it with polarized glasses on... hmmmmm

I got a 7. Problems were in the blue/green.

The first time I did this test I got 30, centred on the green parts of the spectrum.

The second time I was really tired when I did it, spent ages getting it absolutely perfect, and got 55, scattered all over the spectrum.

@Ann - maybe your husband can clarify something for me? I remember reading an article years ago that said something to the effect that because people (especially kids) spend more and more time inside in front of screens, they are losing some ability to distinguish shades of color? Any truth to this?

Jennifer Wadsworth wrote:@Ann - maybe your husband can clarify something for me? I remember reading an article years ago that said something to the effect that because people (especially kids) spend more and more time inside in front of screens, they are losing some ability to distinguish shades of color? Any truth to this?

I will ask. Right now he is pounding t-posts for me.

DH sent this to me today:

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The Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test is a laboratory test given with physical printed materials and not a validated electronic test.

Video monitors cannot damage color vision.

1. Color vision handles all kinds of colors.
Neural color processing evolved to accomodate varied and unpredictable color mixtures arising from solar light. Solar fluxes generate a range of color temperatures over the day, across seasons and latitiudes, and across sky vector (azimuth and altitude). Solar lights are 100 to 100,000 brighter than the brightest monitors, and have Kelvin color temperatures ranging from far redder to far bluer. Nothing happens in a color monitor that does not happen in the real world. Even flicker.

2. Color adaptation is normal.
Long exposures to monitors are harmless. Long exposure to one color can cause a temporary hue aftereffect, but that is simply neural encoding in action. No harm. Try it: use any app and make the screen red. Stare at it with one eye closed for 10-20 seconds. Then look at a white wall alternately through each eye. The wall will look greener-bluer through the adapted eye. If it doesn’t, your monitor is too dim (QED).

3. Extreme lights shift color vision, but only temporarily.
Lord William Rushton, one of the giants of color vision research, bleached his own retinas with near solar levels of monochromatic light in his sutdies of visual pigments. At the end of his life, his vision was not altered. No color monitor can achieve the fluxes used in these studies.

4. Don’t look at the sun, dude.
However, full solar light with high UV content can (1) sunburn your cornea, causing swelling and sun (snow) blindness or (2) cause solar retinopathy which is a temporary (days to months) loss of visual sensitivity. Remember burning ants with the magnifying glass? Well … your lens is a magnifying glass. While the exact mechanism is still unclear, much of the effect is also due to retinal edema (swelling) and is not a true burn. This is because you are mostly water and the latent heat of water is too high for the tiny spot to change temperatuer much. In any case, no computer monitor has ever or will ever reach such such intensities.

5. Some drugs can temporarily alter color vision.
ED drugs, for example. The effect is lasts about as long as the drug's primary effect, but can also be an indicator that you have taken too much. If there is enough drug to make the effect permanent, you would likely have a heart attack first.


Cone distributions vary dramatically across individuals; for normal people they can range from 16 red to 1 green all the way to 3 green to 1 red cone. There are two consequences: 1. broad color discrimination is a neural computation that is independent of the number of red and green cones, so we all have the same colored world in general; 2. fine color discrimination can be influenced by the red/green ratio and people often disagree about what color is true green.

Ann - that was rather fabulous of your husband to send! Please thank him for me - interesting stuff.

What about this female 4th color receptor thing I have hears about. Anyone know how they do on this test?

Had to run this by the DH, who first started studying color vision in 1971 for his doctoral work. He says:

"Finding the tetrachromatic female is really tricky because you have to prove that you are expressing two green gene variants and then do comparative color psychophysics against normal populations. But it stands to reason that many females could be tetrachromats (1 red, 2 green, 1 blue cone type), and that they would have subtly better hue discrimination, but still not as good as a trout or a sparrow, both of which have six or seven kinds of cones."

He also says:

"No matter what, go see an ophthalmologist regularly for macular degeneration and glaucoma, which will creep up on you and you won't know it before it's too late."

Ann Torrence wrote:... but still not as good as a trout or a sparrow, both of which have six or seven kinds of cones.

Feeling a little inadequate now...

Scored 4 within 10 minutes and I recently had cataract surgery on one eye. Its a relief to know my color acuity is still excellent. Thanks for the post!

Thank you for this test! I scored 11. Far more interesting than that, though, I found out that my husband's sister is color-blind. She scored 117! She took another online test, and it said she had mild Protanomaly--a form of red-green colorblindness. Their mom also appears to have the same colorblindness as his sister, though hasn't been tested.

What I don't understand is how is it that my husband does not have colorblindness (he scored 19 on the test), if both his mom and sister have it. Does his sister and mom, perhaps, have a different type of colorblindness that isn't on the X chromosome?

So, when my father-in-law came to visit, I had him take the test, (or, rather, one exactly like it, but that shows what type of colorblindness you have http://www.color-blindness.com/farnsworth-munsell-100-hue-color-vision-test/), and he scored 157 with his results clearly in the Tritanopia spectrum, which is a rare, (1/10,000) dominate trait and the 7th chromosome. My sister-in-law must not have taken a very acfcurate test, since I highly doubt she has a different form from her father, and because she's always confused blues and greens. Since it's a dominate trait, and my husband didn't get it, it looks like my kids won't have that colorblindness. Whew! (Though, red-green colorblindness does run in *my* family--so much colorblindness!)

Judith Browning wrote:I scored a 38. I have cataracts now so i think that maybe makes it harder to distinguish more subtle ranges even though I have always worked with close color ranges in weaving and other fiber work.
I've never tried something like that before...it was was fun and now I need to go stretch my neck a bit from peering at the screen for so long.

I finally got around to taking this color test again after having my second cataract removed (just over a week ago). Besides sharper detail in my vision even more dramatic is how colors have been vivid again so I expected to do better on the test but not this much better..... I got a 4

(EDIT: besides 'new eyes' I do have a better computer screen than the first time I took the test...I'll let it have some of the credit! ...and I also have some vision field loss from glaucoma that didn't seem to effect the results.)

19. All in all, I can live with that

*BUMP!*

I just love this thread. If it were not for this thread, my husband never would have found out that his father and sister have blue/green colorblindness, and his mother has a hard time distinguishing colors across the whole spectrum. All growing up, he was told that a sky blue hairbrush was GREEN...when it was obviously blue. But he thought he must be crazy. When, all along, he was the only one in his family who is NOT colorblind!

Drat!  I get this response when I click on that active link for the test:  

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

Can you maybe copy and paste the link here?  In any case, thanks for a very interesting post.


       

What link went wonkey for you, Marcela? Was it the one in the dailyish, or one of the colorblindness tests?

What response did you get when you tried the link?

I don't know if this helps, but this is the colorblindness test that I really liked. It not only shows you where one's colorblindness is one the whole spectrum, but also what that type of colorblindness is called, if it has a name: http://www.color-blindness.com/farnsworth-munsell-100-hue-color-vision-test/

The original link Jennifer posted was on the social sharing site StumbleUpon which has been shut down and/or migrated to Mix.com. We'll have to use the one Nicole shared or others.

Thank you, Gail! I'll go put a staff note on the first post linking to the colorblindness test in my last post, since that one seems to still be operational.

Gail - thanks for explaining about the original link for the color blindness test, and Nicole - thank you for the "new and improved" link!

marcela

Interesting, my results were in the slight to none category, although it did make my eyes tired.

Well, my results were pitiful 228  hmm didn't think I had any color blindness.  Of course I've had to use cheater's to read for 19 years now...  Ahh the golden years are just gilded me thinks...

thanks for fixing the link. i`m still hopeless! (spent most of my life hearing "but women can't be colorblind". mm, i beg to differ!)

I find colorblindness facinating. Women can have all the types of colorblindness, but since red/green (which is the most common) is carried on the X chromosome, and it's "recessive" a woman needs to inherit the colorblindness gene from BOTH her parents, which is pretty rare. A man, however, only has 1 X chromosome, and so only has to inherit the trait from one parent (his mother, of course). So, it's a whole lot more likely that boys will get red/green colorblindness.

I'm curious, Tereza, did the test tell you what type of colorblindness you had, or was it spread over the whole spectrum?

BUT, other types of colorblindess aren't sex-linked at all! The blue/green colorblindness that my husband's sister and father have is dominate! So, it only has to be inherited from one parent, AND it's just as likely for a girl to get it as a guy (as evidenced by the fact that my husband is not colorblind, but his sister is.)

the result showed an "axis" around green (but did not throw me in one of the groups. My result was 298). I found the green thing funny because I would generally say I have problems with the yellow-red-orange side rather than green or blue. (certain emails and posts, I simply can`t read or see if they are in yellow or orange.)  for the most part i know what the colors are, but it`s just "messy"- comparing or distinguishing them is impossible (those number-bubble test things are the worst). My paternal grandmother was the same way.
My uncle (father's side) is profoundly red-green colorblind, while my father`s vision was perfect. My mother`s side, we don`t really know about her family, so I assume somebody was.