One Hundred Million Colors

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Special filters splitting the blue spectrum show the effect of the glasses.
The bottom lens in the image is unfiltered.
Credit: Brad Gundlach, Greg Vershbow, Mikhail Kats

We are constantly trying to hone our vision as artists—to recognize subtle tone and value differences in the subjects we are painting and to see and differentiate colors clearly. Although it is thought that we see almost one million colors, we see only a small number of the hues that make up the visible spectrum.

We’ve written before, about the science of the human eye, and, how our three types of photo receptors, or cones, allow us to see in a trichromatic color space of red, green and blue. There are those rare few who are born with an extra retinal cone (tetrachromats), allowing them to see one hundred million hues. We have fantasized about what their vision must be like.

Now, physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a way to trick…