Deer sight evaluation idea.

[Tom]

I just had this insight. I've read and heard talks how whitetail only have green and blue cones and we have the additional red cones. Hence, we wear hunter orange and those old timey red and black patterns.

Can't we take a picture, put the file in our photo editor, then take out a lot of the red, and that shows what it looks like to deer?

We could evaluate what a deer sees with our modern computer photo editing software.

What do you think? What do mule deer and elk see, has anyone read about their color vision or lack of it?

 

[dgibson]

Tom, great idea, but unfortunately it's not quite that easy. What you see with the naked eye is quite a bit richer and more varied than you'll ever see on a monitor, even the so-called "high definition" ones. You could probably approximate it to some degree, but it would probably be unreliable.

Also, how would you measure the amount of red to remove, or determine when you've reached "deer vision?" Then there's luminosity and color temperature and depth perception and...

 

[Tom]

Here's the chart that gave me the idea. It shows relative sensitivity of their blue and green and our blue, green, and red. Maybe that's how much of each we should put in our color editors.

http://www.camohunter.com/deervision.html

At least you can see how the orange and more so for red turns to black for a deer in that chart.