I just had the lens in my right eye replaced this afternoon due to a cataract in the old (natural) lens. I’ll have the left eye done on Feb 25. It’s much too early to comment on how much sharper the new (astigmatism-correcting) lens is, but oh wow… how much bluer it is!!
I’m sure my brain will require some time to normalize everything and that won’t be done until both eyes are finished, healed and complete. But right how I have a warm eye and a cold eye. My brain is probably in shock!
It remains to be seen whether or not I feel the need to reprocess any old images.
Just curious… I know color management and a thousand other variables come into play (possibly to the point of making this question meaningless) but in general have my images been excessively skewed to the blue end of the spectrum? Have they been oversaturated?
I wonder if I went overboard compensating for the natural yellowing of my lenses…
On a peripheral note, I’m really looking forward to the ~360 drops I’ll have to instill over the next 60 days or so (NOT!) No pain, just a hassle. But it’s worth it.
I had one eye done before Christmas and the second one last week - the change in brightness and colour is amazing. I feel like I must have been living in a smoke filled bar for the last several years and that my eyes were stained with nicotine.
I have been reprocessing many images every day. I haven’t noticed anyway real change in the way I process colours - but everything sure does look better - cleaner and more vibrant.
I miscalculated on the drops – 240 between both eyes. But still a bunch. I made a printed spreadsheet form to keep track of what’s what. LOL
We were watching Jeopardy! (US quiz show, if you’re not familiar) on TV and since only one eye is done, the (in reality) white letters on blue backgrounds were a combination of blue-white and yellow letters. Really big difference.
Hopefully any reprocessing (if I decide to do it) might be a simple matter of find the appropriate white balance ‘offset’ and just applying it. But that’s so simple it’s probably guaranteed to not work…
I can’t say I have noticed a distinct color skew to your more recent images. I wonder if when the other eye is done things will not look so blue, since you won’t have that side-by-side image thing going on.
The human visual system adapts to the chromaticity of the light received by the retina, so when both lenses are slightly yellowish, this has no impact on our colour vision. I wouldn’t expect any colour bias in your edits. See other threads on the forum about cataracts.
Cataracts often also cause glare, which reduces contrast, both overall and local. This might have an effect. If you have edited photos while both eyes had glare, you may find after operations that you have over-sharpened those images.
If you have a cataract in only one eye, and hence a yellow shift in only that eye, this may confuse your HVS. Especially if you fixate with only one eye (“ignoring” the image from the other eye). But if you edit with a neutral gray surround, you can compensate.
Yep. This is very evident when looking at high contrast situations, for example, a bright window in an otherwise darkened room. There’s so much glare I can’t see pictures hanging on the wall next to the window.
But that’s half fixed now!
Now that the dilation is gone I can see the increased sharpness in my right eye, thanks to the astigmatism correction. LED lights look incandescent in my left eye, but like LEDs in the right.
Would it be possible for you to make a picture with split WB, where each half will be correctly white balanced to each of your eyes? I’d be curious to see the difference in practice
I’m used to the aural equivalent. I know my HF hearing is non-existent, and therefore I can no longer comment on frequency balance. But I had not thought that the same thing can happen with eyes.
All the best for your recovery and adjustment. It is in my future: I have cataract, but not yet needing surgery.
When I do, I don’t know that if I will get anything other than entry level. Might not correct cataract astigmatism (certainly won’t prevent typing nonsense!). Anyway, hoping for a few years yet before having to think of it.
I’ve thought about that and may try to approximate what I’m seeing. Even with just one lens replaced at the moment (and only two days since surgery) I can already see my brain trying to normalize it. Interesting.
I tend to not shoot (much) in really bright, harsh light. And right now it’s January so everything is dead. Bottom line: I have no really colorful images of my own! LOL
So I’ve taken @mino’s nice Play Raw of breakfast and tried to use it instead. While I wasn’t there when it was shot, it’s composed of familiar objects and I think I can get pretty close to their actual appearance. Adjusting it to mimic my “old” eye was far more difficult. I had to look at something else, alternately close one eye then the other, note the difference, then try to apply that difference to this image. It’s not exact by any means (it’s more noticeable IRL and right sunlight seems to really trigger it) but it’ll give you an idea. Maybe I’m now seeing UV!!! The water glass is a little over-blue but I didn’t worry about correcting that since it’s only a little off. Overall a less inherently yellow-ish image might make for a better comparison. Rather than a split A/B image I’ve included both versions.
Also the comment upthread about my brain likely over compensating because I have a warm and cold eye right now it almost certainly true. I’m sure part of the bluish cast is due to the contrast against my yellowed cataract lens still remaining. The new lens is clear, not blue, so the color should be true.
Another interesting thing I noticed is, I can tell which eye is primarily seeing what due to the color differences. While sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room yesterday afternoon, when I looked down at my blue and white sneakers / trainers, the right one (seen more by my left eye) was duller and yellower than the left one (seen more by my right eye).
You dont have to worry about seeing UV light after cataract surgery. All intraocular lenses (IOLs) implanted in cataract surgery contain a UV filter to protect the retina from getting sun burnt.
The following webpage gives a good overview on the optics and light sensors of the human eye. https://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color1.html
The paragraph on prereceptoral filtering in the chapter “design of the eye” describes how UV and a significant portion of blue is filtered out within the eye before light reaches the photoreceptors. The human visual system is well adapted to compensate the resulting yellow color cast and can compensate the yellowing of our eye lenses with age to maintain a stable color perception and perception of white, just as it can compensate the differences in light color between yellow dawn or dusk sunlight and blue skylight.
The difference between the clear IOL in your right eye and your yellowed lens in your left eye appears to be too large to get compensated by your visual system, so you get a different color perception for both eyes which persists.
I have personally experienced three similar instances of differences in color perception between the eyes which occurred without physical changes to my eyes.
The first two times, the difference occurred while I didn’t wear my glasses (I am shortsighted) and had the eyes defocused, i.e. in parallel. Alternately covering an eye had an effect like changing white balance, with a different but constant color perception for both eyes. This sensation lasted only a few seconds until I focused my view onto an object, which instantly led to identical color perception for both eyes.
In the third instance, the sensation lasted several minutes and did not change even when focusing on a nearby object. The difference in color perception was mainly on the red/green balance, with a greenish color cast and subdued reds seen with my left eye, while color perception appeared as usual with my right eye. I also noted that the difference in color perception was apparent for the parts of the field of sight viewed by only one eye. The sensation appeared and disappeared without a recognizable trigger and remained a singular experience.
Therefore, I am quite sure that as soon as you will have an IOL in both eyes, your visual system will regain the color compensation as it was before cataract surgery. You don’t have to worry that the world will turn all blueish.
It is not uncommon to have a slight but definite color shift between your two eyes. I noticed this when I was a kid laying on the grass and looking at the blue sky. The color through my left (nearsighted) eye was definitely a bit greener than through my right (20/20). I don’t think this had anything to do with my then uncorrectable eyes but was a real difference of some other sort. Several years ago I had something similar happen with my ears: all of a sudden the hearing in my left ear dropped 10% (from excellent) relative to my right. Fortunately, the difference went away after several months as mysteriously as it arose. It’s almost time for cataract surgery for me too.
From what I’ve read (from a few UCL papers) the issue is that whilst the HVS can compensate for yellowing of the eye under broad spectrum light, when using narrow spectra blue primaries for colour mixing it’s much more difficult. The yellowing greatly reduces the amount of blue light due to the very narrow spectra.
When I was tested for military service, the doc did some tests. He told me there is a lot of natural variation. Not only with the lens (natural of synthetic), but also in your retina (later I learned a lot as former geneticist on retina diseases. I could explain the biochemical mechanisms if you like)
In my case: my right eye shows a more ‘saturated’ world view than my left eye (more like a dialed down saturation in color balance rgb)
In your case, what has happened: your implant does not filter UV light as much as natural lenses, this may give a bluish tint to your vision. Actually Monet saw enhanced blue and purple tones in his later works after undergoing cataract surgery in 1923, allowing him to see UV light since those very early lenses did not filter UV as well as modern lenses.
The water glass is a little over-blue but I didn’t worry about correcting that since it’s only a little off. Overall a less inherently yellow-ish image might make for a better comparison. Rather than a split A/B image I’ve included both versions.
