wavelengths | Outside The Lines

For many people, being colorblind is a way of life. There are no magic pills to take or corrective surgeries to explore. Once the diagnosis is reached, it is highly unlikely that a person will ever see beyond his or her dingy view of the world.

Unless he or she has the help of new age corrective lenses by EnChroma®, seeing color is near impossible.

Prescription glasses have been correcting eye problems for years. Now, Digital Color Boost^TM technology is making up for what colorblind people lack. The journey to discover these compensatory lenses began about one decade ago. Scientists at Enchroma, the company that owns and distributes the Digital Color Boost sunglasses, were given grant money to find an optical solution to the age-old problem of colorblindness.

Scientist found that “…by filtering wavelengths of light, the color signal sent to the brain could be amplified.” Filtration is provided by the Digital Color Boost coating, which is sometimes put onto lenses 100 layers thick. From there, cuts are strategically made in the spectrum to manipulate incoming wavelengths. This allows some photons to pass through the lenses while others are blocked, which in turn introduces color to the colorblind.

The science and technology goes far beyond the scope of common thought, but EnChroma makes it easy to digest in the “How it Works” section on their website (http://enchroma.com/technology/how-it-works/).

Beyond the technology, the packaging of EnChroma sunglasses and the public’s reception of the product is anything but confusing. People are crazy about this product and how it remedies a problem that, for so long, people accepted as, “the way it is.”

Playwright Kelly Kittell told BoingBoing.net, “The first time I saw brick red I was so overwhelmed I stopped cold. Purple and lavender, where have you been all my life?” Lives are changing thanks to the new technology that is introducing them to a world of color.

Kittell goes onto admit that it is distracting to use the glasses at first. “You won’t be able to stop yourself from peeking under the glasses over and over again to verify your favorite gray sweater is actually a dusty rose. It is.”

His thoughts are confirmed by a young caucasian boy, the demographic who is the most likely to be diagnosed with color blindness. Owen’s mom and dad surprised him with EnChroma sunglasses one day. They recorded his reaction to share with the EnChroma blog. Check out Owen’s reaction as he challenges himself to keep the sunglasses on his face after being shocked by color: http://enchroma.com/call-for-enchroma-videos/.

EnChroma understands exactly what they do for the people whom they serve. Their tag line boasts: Color for the Colorblind. With digital color boost technology, they are doing what has thought of as impossible. They are introducing people with colorblindness to the world of color.

Read more Segmation blog posts about colorful technology:

Color-changing Properties Make Gold Multi-purposeful

Extracting Art from Science

Art Illuminates Science

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Does anyone remember a time before color photographs?

When photography began to flourish in the early 1900s, the camera produced only black and white images. However, a desire stirred inside many people, like physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who wrote about the first technique used to color photographs in 1855. Through his work, other photography enthusiasts were able to develop the capacity to capture life in living colors.

Maxwell predicted that it was possible to capture the essence of a photograph—the arrangement of color—in a time when only black and white photographs were produced. He wrote about color vision; a study to advance the concept that color identified by both human brains and machines is based on the wavelengths of light that reflect, emit, or transmit color signals. Maxwell found that a wide range of colors could be created by mixing only three pure colors of light: red, green, and blue. This manipulation of color had to be done in proportional amounts to stimulate the three types of cells the same way “real” colors did. In his writing, Maxwell used black and white photography as an analogy for his findings.

Maxwell’s Analogy:

If three black and white photographs were taken of the same setting through red, green, and blue filters, then made into transparencies (also known as negatives or slides), one could project light through these filters and superimpose them into a single image on a screen. The result would be an image that reproduced all of the colors seen in the original setting, not just red, green, and blue.

At this time, Isaac Newton’s work advancing the fact that all color is influenced by light, was common knowledge. In a similar fashion, Maxwell insisted that eyes see color on the surface of a perceived shade, where millions of intermingled cone cells represent only three colors. Red and blue sit at opposite ends of the spectrum with green planted as a middle region. They signal sensitivities (red) and stimulation (blue) that eyes receive when light shines through particular colors. The process of taking a set of three monochrome “color separations,” was also known as the triple projection method. Maxwell’s analogy was first tested by Thomas Sutton in 1861. However, the experiment did not work and the desire for photographs to represent living colors encouraged other enthusiasts to develop the art of color photography, which picked up steam again in 1890.

Color photography has been around for a little over one hundred years, and look at how far it has come. Flawless colors and mass production of images show how color photography has influenced enthusiasts and much of the world. This, however, is made possible because of the records kept during photograph exposure, like the triple exposure method which was outlined in Maxwell’s analogy. At the end of the appropriate exposure time, analyzing the spectrum of colors into three channels of information, red, green and blue, helped form a method to imitate the way a human eye senses color. The recorded information has been used to reproduce and enhance the original colors by mixing together aspects of the red, green, and blue lights and removing or adding elements of white light.

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