Do your glasses make you edit differently?

Lounge
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I wear glasses, specifically “Essilor Ormix Crizal Sapphire HR”. I noticed that they have a slightly yellow tint and also asked my optometrist about that. She then called Essilor and asked about that and confirmed me that there is no extra filter in the glasses (for example blue light cut - however, the Essilor Website states that Crizal Sapphire HR reduces UV light and blue light :thinking:) and that slight tint is due to compromises of weight, thickness, anti-reflection-coating etc… and cannot be avoided.
Before getting these glasses, I had Essilor AirWear (without the Crizal coating), which do not had that tint that strongly. Comparing them side by side showed me that also they have a slight tint but not that much. However, AirWear is apparently an old product and the coating on those is not as good as with the others… She said she can still order them but the glass quality is apparently a bit worse than the current ones. I said, that the tint is not that much of an issue that I want to spend >300€ again.

Coming back to the initial question: I don’t think I edit photos that differently, however, now that I’m aware of this tint in the glass… You know how it is… Now I recognize it everywhere! :rofl:
So, what is your experience with glasses, specifically for editing photos? Any recommendations for specific glasses / coatings?

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I use chinese made glasses(Firmoo) to avoid the essilor-luxottica monopoly and having to pay 10x for the same quality of eyeglasses. I only have mild astigmatism so can’t comment on heavy prescriptions but so far so good.

My glasses have no tint and also have anti-reflective coating which works pretty well. My sister who has a heavier prescription had glasses with UV/Blue Light block which do have a slight yellow tint. I tried them on and it makes the world depressing, you can’t enjoy the natural colors of certain times of day anymore :smiley:

She has gotten some Firmoo glasses as well, with the same prescription, and they have absolutely no tint.

IMO UV block is useless, just get some sunglasses, and for blue light there’s really not much evidence supporting blocking it as well.

If you can spare 50€ or so, I would recommend trying to order some Firmoo(or other similar brand) glasses, just as a curiosity and to compare lenses with your current ones.

Rant:

I can’t believe how the EU still hasn’t broken up this horrible monopoly that makes families, often impoverished, spend hundreds of euros for 50+ year old lens technology when it can be made for cheap now.

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Interesting! 50€ is something I can afford :wink: Only thing I would definitely miss is the frame - I really like my Silhouette frame :sweat_smile: (But they seem to offer similar looking ones too…)

Yes. I think the same and want to avoid it. It’s interesting that Essilor claims there is no filter in the glass. I actually believe them, that there is no extra filter, so I think what they say is that due to the glass itself, some of the blue light is removed and thus they putting it as a “good thing” on their website.

I know someone with Zeiss glasses, which costs ~1000€… But these are special multi-focal glasses. But yeah - I don’t understand it either. The material itself cannot costs that much (?) and all they probably do is put it into a CNC machine. I always feel robbed when I need to buy new ones for like 300+€ - especially, as they are apparently already at a reduced price etc… Fortunately, I do not need new ones often and so far I have to spend more money on repairing the frame…

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I wear “Reactions” for everyday use, which change with the intensity of the light. They are tinted.

However, the reading glasses that I wear for processing images are not tinted.

I have to wonder if the images I produce are influenced at all by the different glasses.

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I wear whatever lenses and frames my insurance covers! LOL I don’t know for sure where they’re made but all things considered China is about a 98% probability. They have AR coatings but that’s it. I’ve noticed a very slight warm-ish tint through them, but again all things considered I’ve never reached the point where that’s the biggest issue with my photos. :crazy_face: Just sayin’…

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My eyes have always been sensitive to the light and since my youth I have pretty much always worn sunglasses outside. I have fly fished for 40+ years. One of the staples of such an activity is polarized sunglasses, so in my early 20s I switched to always wearing polarized sunglasses. I didn’t start wearing prescription glasses until I was about 30. Since then, all of my sunglasses are prescription, polarized glasses. I often fly fish until it is too dark to see, so I have amber-tinted, polarized sunglasses which help me see better in low light.

So I see the world through amber-tinted polarized sunglasses…my “reality” of the world is a bit different than a lot of other people’s reality. When I shoot, it is almost always with a CPL filter, which isn’t the way the world “really is”…

I spend too much time in front of a computer monitor, which I need a prescription lens to see clearly. And they are the blue light blocking kind, so, like @lphilpot, I too notice a slight warmish tint. But I often don’t wear them, I just zoom in.

When I edit, I tend to lean toward what I remember seeing, which isn’t a “real” depiction of the world, and occasionally the monitor through my computer glasses aren’t a real depiction either (when I do use them, I take them off to check the color and adjust to my liking).

That’s the long version to the fact that I have no idea how accurate my edits are to reality, and the computer glasses impact my editing to a small degree in that I take them off to check the color.

However, I’m usually more interested in the “artistic” vision I want to portray rather than represent reality with 100% accuracy, so I edit until it looks good to me.

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I noticed that they have a slightly yellow tint and also asked my optometrist about that.

How heavy is the tint? You could measure this by photographing a colour chart or gray card or brick wall or anything with and without holding your glasses over the lens. What adjustments do you need to make one image look like the other?

Your visual system will accommodate to a colour shift. The HVS is good at this. However, there is a secondary effect that shifts tones. If you have an object that is yellow and light blue, such that they appear the same brightness, then when you have a yellow filter in front of your eyes (or camera) the blue patch will darken more than the yellow patch.

Just for fun: you have two eyes, so you can compare them with each other. When I view the left square with my left eye, and the right square with my right eye, they appear to be the same colour and same tone, near enough.

x
x640×320 445 Bytes

The Windows ImageMagick command that made the image is:

magick -size 300x300 xc:#808080 xc:#8c8a88 -bordercolor Black -border 10 +append +repage x.png

(If used in bash, then quote the tokens that contain #.)

My left (artificial) lens is Californian; the right is Texan. Perhaps they are calibrated for the local markets. More likely, my eyes have aged in different ways. I don’t think this has much impact when editing images. I just have to be aware that my judgement of neutral grays is wonky.

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The tint of eyeglasses depends on a number of factors.

Modern eyeglasses are not made of glass but of a polycarbonate polymer with a high refractive index. These high refractive polymers contain aromatic moieties which make them sensitive to short wavelength light, causing them to yellow over time when exposed to UV light. Light stabilizers added to the polymer retard this yellowing, but cannot completely prevent it over time. Therefore, your glasses will develop a yellow tint over the years.

Quality eyeglasses have anti-reflective coatings which reduce the amount of light reflected at the surface. However, their effect depends on the wavelength of the light and the viewing angle. The reflected light then gets colored and the transmitted light gets tinted with the opposite hue. Therefore, even new glasses with an anti-reflective coating will show a slight tint.

Most quality eyeglasses also contain a UV-absorbent, which may be in the polymer itself, in an extra coating or in both. This UV-absorbent protects your eyes from UV light, which is a good idea, because UV light causes aging and yellowing of your eye lens over time. However, these UV-absorbents do not provide a sharp cutoff at a specific wavelength, but have an absorption tailing to longer wavelengths into the purple and blue part of the spectrum, Therefore, they will inevitably cause a slight yellow tint of the transmitted light.

Alan has already pointed out that the human visual system is good in compensating such a color tint and this is particularly the case for a yellow tint. The reason is that such compensation capability is needed for a physiological reason. Human tissue is sensitive to UV light and the eye’s retina needs UV protection or it would get sun burnt. This UV protection is provided by a UV-absorbent present in the eye lens, which has the same shortcoming as the UV-absorbent in eyeglasses: its light absorption extends into the blue part of the visible spectrum and thus causes a yellow tint of the transmitted light. You can find details at handprint : light and the eye, a website that provides a wealth of information on human vision.

If you wear your glasses all day long, your visual system will compensate the color tint of your glasses, just as it compensates the color tint caused by the UV-absorbent in the eye lens, so you will have almost the same color perception as without glasses.

I use two pairs of glasses, both with progressive lenses by Zeiss. The first one has full correction for view at infinite distance and has a UV filter and an anti-reflective coating. The second one are so-called office eyeglasses with reduced correction for view to at most 5 m and an enlarged middle section for a viewing distance of about 80 cm. The second one has an additional blue light filter and therefore has a distinctive yellow tint.

In direct back to back comparison, the yellow tinted office eyeglasses provide a color perception of an approximately 200 K higher color temperature.

However, the edits I have made wearing these tinted glasses do not deviate notably from the edits I have made with the other glasses. Apparently, when using the more tinted glasses for some time, the tint gets sufficiently compensated by my brain to not affect the results.

And of course, looking for objects in a scene that you perceived as neutral white or gray and adjusting color temperature and tint based on color picker readings at these spots helps a lot in getting your colors right.

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Since my cataract operations, I’ve worn cheap +1.50 reader bifocals. Last pair had a UV-blocking tint; I sat on those, the replacement pair doesn’t have it.

At any rate, when I assess and modify color in an image, I tend to lift the glasses to my forehead. Looking at color doesn’t require acuity, so I just shrug off the slight blur. I also take them off when outside at either dawn or dusk, mainly because with the low light the frames just compound the attenuation of the view.

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I got my new glasses made last year. And I went through the catalgoue with the assistant in the store to make sure to avoid any tinted glasses with warming filters, so that they are completely color neutral. If I need a warming tint to avoid blue light, there’s always the OS system option that I use frequently for writing.

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I have only read a little bit, but this resource is amazing. Not only does it seem very in depth, but the prose is really good too, which is not common at all with these kinds of technical texts. Thanks for sharing

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My optometrist explained it in the same way and also said that my glasses look completely normal and she cannot make out any ageing or damage. I bought them in 10/2024.
She also said, that heat can damage them as well, but she cannot make out any heat-damage.

I tried to take a photograph of the glass in front of a white paper. By eye, you can make out the faint tint when moving the glasses around, but it is really hard to do a still photo. There are just too many reflections and shadows everywhere - I think I would need to build some enclosure or to borrow a proper spectrometer and light source.

My optometrist confirmed me, that the ones I have should be almost color neutral, at least what you can get with polymer glasses and the coating. Which ones do you have now?

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Darn, I’m afraid I don’t remember! I don’t know if I still have the paper slip, I’ll try and find it though haha.

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Who cares?
I think the right question is:

I wear Hoya multifocal glasses. They have as well a slightly yellowish tint. But what changes with this?

I have two Dell-Monitors which look even carefully calibrated slightly different. Every person sees colour slightly different. Men and women are seeing colours slightly different. People see colours differently with changing surrounding light…

In Play Raw we are all altering colours to our own taste, we change WB, we change saturation, we even use LUTs.

So do you really think a touch of colour tint of your glasses really matter.

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