Color IQ
We VJs need to see. At least having one eye and some intuitive instinct about colors and looks are helpful to do a great show with a nice color ambience. There a different viewing disabilities, red-green blindness and blue–yellow blindness, that affect a significant percentage of the population. It is quite intriguing to consider that many of us may not perceive colors in the same way. Think about color shemes in advertisement or red and green traffic lights. „In individuals with Northern European ancestry, as many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women experience the common form of red-green color blindness“ (wikipedia).
Color blindness is no actual blindnesses but there is a deficiency of color vision, and are also referred to as „Daltonism“ in honour of John Dalton a researcher who was the first to formally describe problems at colour perception. Since both he and his brother were colour blind, he recognized that this condition must be hereditary (through the then yet unknown genes).
X-Rite, a company that specializes in the technology and science of color and who also owns the popular printing color system Pantone offers a tool to test your „Color IQ“ online based on the FM100 Hue Test by X-Rite. A series of subtly varied color swatches ranging between two hues is presented out of order, and it’s up to you to rearrange the swatches so that the gradient between the two colors is correct.
Well, I scored three points (was a bit too fast in the red spectrum, now I see it, ya know). If you are worse you should probably VJ in black and white only 🙂
Take the test (but take some time!): HERE!
wikipedia on color blindness
more facts on color vision: http://www.xrite.com/munsell-color-vision-facts
Yochanan Rauert aka Yochee is working as a VJ in Münster, Germany since 2002 and is the editor and founder of www.visual-society.com