P: Software strategies for colorblind customers

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hi there. In colour blind and I was wondering if lightroom could have a couple of features to help out. Maybe with setting the white balance and the colour picker. In the HSL panel it could show what colours I'm picking. Maybe have a "colour peaking" option to show if a photo is becoming too saturated. Or if you could come up with some ideas to help edit photos that would be great. Cheers

[smathia]

You can use the grid from the core picker when it's sampling g the actual image and see the RGB values. I have a colorblind client and he uses this method.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I’m colourblind and i also refer to the RGB values in the histogram tab to help when I’m adjusting white balance etc. Works well for me...

[TheDigitalDog]

You can work by the numbers in some cases. For example, when R=G=B, you've got a neutral. 
When working with skin tones, Lab is useful too. Looking over most of the good skin tone reference files I have, including the Roman 16*, aStar and bStar are often numerically very close and never more than 10-12 values difference. As seen here:
http://digitaldog.net/files/SkinToneLAB.jpg

In Lab, the aStar and bStar values are key. Both should be positive values. Both should be within 10-12 values units of each other. If the B value is lower than A, skin starts to appear magenta or pink looking. When B is higher than A the skin appears more yellow. The closer to zero, the more pale.

You may also note that in ACR/LR, the Temperature and Tint sliders are effectively the same as the A & B channels of LAB. The Temp Axis (blue-yellow) equates to LAB B and the Tint axis (Gren- Magenta) equates to the LAB A. 

*https://www.bvdm-online.de/themen/technik-forschung/standardwerke/roman16/

[hydrazoan]

Hi, I hope I’m not being rude by asking, but how do you get on with skin tones? Although I’m not colour blind, I do find it hard to get right without some sort of reference, usually resorting to software other than lightroom - I’m wondering if there is some insight that you might have that could help everyone else, I guess. Thanks.

[phillipp97141014]

Enchroma is or has developed a set of glasses that are not as dark as the first generation sun glasses.  I failed the red/green and blue/purple test they put on their web page to see if there is some hope.  I have about a 50/50 chance of seeing true colors.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Regarding the HSL panel, you can use the Target Adjustment Tool to see what colors are being affected. As for white balance, if you can include a X-Rite ColorChecker chart in the scene, then WB eye dropper click on the light grey patch , that will give you a neutral grey. It’s not always perfect, but generally good. I would also recommend shooting with Auto WB, in raw of course.

[edmundgall]

Shooting in Auto WB makes it more difficult in copying settings from one photo to others from the same session in Lightroom. Better to use the ColorChecker and a fixed WB setting in camera...

[edmundgall]

While many above have proposed methods that rely on using numbers (e.g. RGB, LAB, etc) I think it would be more useful for users like Logan if Adobe's developers increase their efforts to address the challenges that their colour-blind users face through tools that rely on the numbers to work but provide a more user-friendly interface (so users won't have to do the math themselves). For e.g., Logan's "colour peaking" control: just as we can click on tools to have LR show clipping on the histogram, maybe something similar can be developed to give relevant warnings on the histogram or via mask overlays on the image if users configure a new LR preference setting where they state what type of colour blindness they suffer from.

Hence, I've added my vote to Logan's idea above.

I'm currently receiving training on how to create effective visual dashboards for getting timely insights from data, and the use of colour is one of the more useful methods for encoding results. However, as 1 in 12 men & 1 in 200 women are affected by any of the 3 main types of colour blindness, we need to be aware of how they perceive our dashboards in order to mitigate the risk of misinfo. One website I've been advised to consult is: http://www.vischeck.com/info/

Folks with considerable experience in using applications for producing visual dashboards don't think that application developers have done all they could for this demographic: developers have been more concerned with adding as many bells & wihistles to their tools and providing means to make their customers use them, but they typically assume their customer can see the every colour like they do (when that's not the case).

Maybe the above link might prove useful to the Adobe developers, and digital photo artists who choose & manipulate their colours via processing software for effect, or even folks such as Logan...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

[mariah1902]

That is a brilliant idea. No one really ever though of that. I guess it will not be possible as far as I know that color blind people does not see any color. All colors are like black and white to them. No software sadly can make the color be seen in the eyes of a color blind person. 

[BHSnapper]

Colour blindness is a misleading term. Totally colour blind people see mainly in grays but they are extermely rare. I'm red-green colour blind (the commonest, 12% of all men), so I cannot easily distinguish red-green-browns. I confuse yellow and lime green!

To correct skin colours I never use Lightroom but Photoshop. I check skin tones by looking at Cyan, Magenta and Yellow with the colour sampler tool on 11*11. A "normal" light caucasian skin colour could be Cy=12%, Ma=25%,Ye=30%. Black (K) is rarely needed.

I then convert the photo to CYMK colours, create a curves adjustment layer & use this to tweak the values until I'm happy. But be careful that the eye colour is OK! I never flattten the layers so I  can go back and tweak it  again.

Sounds fiddly but it works!