Jacket advice for colorblind person

[OC Richard]

Imagine my surprise when I learned I was seeing the Leaping Salmon colors "wrong."

I am specifically "protanomalous." That means I don't have enough red receptors. Red doesn't "pop" for me and it tends to fade out into blends, which is why it gets confused with green.

I was under the impression that Leaping Salmon was in fact blue and green rather than blue and muted red/brown. So I went and pulled every image I could find of the tartan and put them into the Paint program on my laptop. And used the color picker tool to isolate the hues so the computer could tell me what was what.

That's cool that they have a program like that! Though putting colours into words is never very satisfactory, and I've noticed over the years that people in the UK and people in the USA often "draw the lines" between colours in different places. (Colour is a continuous blended spectrum, words are not, so each culture snips different places along the spectrum to fit with each word.)

I've not seen Leaping Salmon in person, I only have this image, and have it as it appears on my laptop now.

But I would call the colours like this: upon a rich deep blue field, a pair of Salmon stripes, bordered by Olive Drab stripes.
The blue field contains a muted yellow line, and the Olive Drab stripes each contain a lavender line.

"Salmon" is a specific colour, or more accurately a range of colours (like all "colours" are).

This is the tartan version of the "Is the dress blue or white?" from a few years ago.

In my opinion that silliness had nothing to do with colour perception. Rather, it was a matter of the inevitable thing that happens when you ask an ambiguous question: you get two different answers, both equally correct.

In art there's a term "local colour" meaning the surface colour of an object under neutral light, meaning natural outdoors light. This is to be kept differentiated from the colour of that same object under other lighting conditions.

For example, say at a wedding reception the DJ has brought in lights with blue film over them, casting everything in blue light. A photo is taken of the Bride, Groom, and several other people.

In the photo everything has a blue cast: everyone's faces, the shirts of the men, the dresses of the women including the Bride's dress.

"What colour is the Bride's dress?"

That question is ambiguous, giving us too little to go on, and can't be answered.

To anyone who knows lighting, art, photography, etc the question needs to be more specific:

1) "What is the local colour of the surface of the Bride's dress itself?" (That is, what colour would the dress appear under natural outdoor lighting?)

We humans are very good at, without consciously doing it, mentally balancing/adjusting/correcting all the colours in a photo, so in old orange-cast photos we know that people didn't all have orange skin and didn't all wear orange clothes and that the sky wasn't orange in broad daylight. In like manner we glance at this blue-cast wedding photo and unconsciously adjust the colours because we know that all the people didn't have blue skin and thus weren't all wearing blue clothes. The answer to this question is "white".

2) "What is the local colour of the surface of the photo itself in the region of the Bride's dress?" For that we can hold up colour-swatches (Pantone etc) against that bit of the surface of the photo to avoid doing those unconscious colour-corrections we naturally do. The answer to this question is "blue".

It's just like where I work: they came out with a new job application, and it has a question

"Have you, or have you not, ______________ ?" Yes/No

Every applicant asks me "what is THAT supposed to mean? I tell them to leave it blank.

I'm still going to get this tartan, but will just be a little more careful in assembling outfits!

Actually I don't think you need to terribly careful, because it's the very nature of the tweeds we've been discussing to be complex and subtle, thus harmonising with pretty much anything.

[Silmakhor]

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that the blue dress/white dress confusion was the result of the same *biological* process that leads to color perception difficulty - rather, that the queasy feelings of ambiguity generated by the dress question is a constant fact of life for a colorblind person

Also, thanks for your color labeling description of the Leaping Salmon tartan - much appreciated.