My understanding is that it does just mean more nuance in color perception. Probably not useful for most people, but great if you’re trying to help 6th graders match a color they made last week and can’t recreate, or you work in an industry such as fashion where color nuance is important. There are people who are genetically able to smell much more acutely than everyone else, and I think unless they make perfume or work in the wine industry it’s not a huge deal.
We do see colors you don’t see. That’s the point.
Not necessarily. The dog pigments were selected solely on what wavelengths of dog-visible light they reflect. Any of them could also reflect light outside of the normal dog spectrum, or turn out to be more specifically tuned - the trichromatic dog artist might find that the pigment used in a “yellow” crayon was well in the area they see as “red”, while the pigment in a “Dalmatian Yellow” tube of oil paint reads as “orange”, and a “Yellow Ochre” tube reads as “intensely yellow”. They may also find that things added to the paints for other purposes reflect strongly enough that they override colors, perhaps an “iridescent blue” is more of a “screaming fire truck” to them.
And they may also explore their own pigments, manufactured paints are a relatively recent thing and there are still artists whose craft involves exploring that!
I have it, too. And I’m an artist, a woman artist. I’ve read that I see more hues at least in part because my father was color blind. Somehow that mutation affected my genetic ability to perceive more colors than most peeps. There’re a lot of artists and a lot of color blind men in both sides of my family, which is all Irish on both sides, related. Hey, it’s a small island. A clerk in a store tried to tell me their wasn’t any difference in the color of the articles I was interested in buying. He was an old white guy, go figure. I asked for a female clerk.
What? Men denying women’s experiences!?! That NEVER happens, except literally every day to everyone one of us! /s
But seriously, the people here just denying this woman’s reality is depressing. The assumption that they must know better than her, for whatever reason is upsetting and illustrative of our lived reality as women on any number of issues. 
Thanks for sharing your experience as an artist!
The color vision gene is in the X chromosome - the same mutation that give some XX chromosome-owners tetrachromatic vision also give some XY chromosome-owners a version of color blindness. If you have the mutation and an X and Y chromosome, you only have one copy of the color vision gene, so your color vision isn’t expanded, it’s merely shifted - you can’t see the colors most people can; if you have two Xes, you have the mutant copy and the usual copy, so you have an extended range of color vision.
try taking the farnsworth munsell test and see how well you do on it. i scored a perfect 0 in under five minutes the first time i took it. admittedly, i took it using the tile set but i just tried it online and even with the possible problems with the color rendering of my monitor i got a perfect 0 on it as well and, again, did it in about three minutes.
Our computer monitors potentially do not produce the wavelengths of light that create perceptual representations (colors) in her brain though!
RGB tile sorting on a monitor with a color spectrum designed for avg humans seems like a very tri-chroma centric test metric. And there’s a range of ability to do that amongst us humans who don’t have a fourth cone.
It’d be really cool if she painted some color blindness cards (the ones with the dots and hidden numbers) where only she could see the number. Where no human with three cones could see it. Then you’d have me convinced that her colors are beyond our comprehension, which would be the much neater outcome!!
Thanks for that link but wow, the instructions for how to perform the test on that page are VERY badly written! It took multiple read-throughs for me to get what they intended. At first, I assumed there was some kind of problem with what my browser was allowing until I eventually got how to do things.
My result was a 4 and the computer monitor I use is an HP Z27n G2, which is supposed to have relatively good color accuracy. Maybe that also makes some amount of difference.
You might enjoy a game called I Love Hue, which is a lot like the tiled test. They change up shapes to try to keep the game interesting, although it still gets repetitive after a while.
Why? They’d have to mix colors made with approximate shades from available pigments including how those pigments sit next to each other on a canvas to achieve an impression just like any other artist wouldn’t they? Which would also not translate perfectly over a screen (not to mention pigments change over time anyway). So you have an impression of something made by an artist with some aspect of that process being used to tout that artist’s unique individual perception and ability to capture that perception being featured in the promotion of that work. Which is pretty much how art works, especially for painting. So… What’s to be skeptical about? Are you skeptical that other painters are able to capture approximations of their experiences in paint? If an artist was colorblind and talked about that being important to their process would you have a hard time believing it?
“Antico is an artist and she says that her psychedelic color paintings depict what she perceives.”
Surely they’d look normal to us if that were true.
There’s a lot at play here. I’m not an expert, but this is my understanding: The light sensors in the eye pick up different wavelengths at different levels of sensitivity. What you perceive as color is an interpretation of the intensity of the signal detected by each type, blended. So perceiving more colors doesn’t require someone to be able to detect more or different frequencies of light. They have different sensory apparatus than you do, and processing that sensory input results in different a perception. In this case, it seems like “different” is “more” and I’m willing to accept their word on that score.
My understanding is that this is relatively common - I’ve read that some people have receptors in their eyes that can detect ultraviolet light, but the lens of the eye includes a layer to filter out UV to prevent damage to the retina. In cataract surgery, this layer is removed, allowing these people to perceive new colors in the UV range for the first time in their lives.
Apologies, no links to back these up right now. Just trivia that I’ve picked up over the years and which I hope I’ve remembered correctly.
ETA: Links! Looks like Claude Monet was one of those people affected by cataract surgery. And here’s a first-person account from modern times
The Wikipedia article on Color Vision indicates that my explanation above is really oversimplified, but still probably good enough in the scope of discussion
This isn’t true. She could mix two shades of a colour using existing pigments that would look the same to you but different to her as she has a greater sensitivity.
If you went to the dog-universe oil paint store, could you really make all of the colors that humans can see? Or would you have to go out and make your oil paints yourself from things in nature that provided the missing colors?
Dogs have 2 cones, most humans have 3, and she has 4.
She doesn’t just see the colors better, she might see colors that we cannot comprehend. That’s the point of my analogy.
I got 8 and have some colour blindness. (“Normal” was 16 to something)
What was interesting were the ones I knew I had wrong but could not order.
