You may find this interesting, or not! LOL Had cataract removal surgery on my left eye this last Thursday. All went perfect. By the end of the day Friday the vision / acutance of the “new eye” was pretty darn good. It’s supposed to improve over the first week or two, to whatever “best” will be, but I’m thrilled with where it is “already.” What I found fascinating, and a bit disturbing, had to do with the difference in “color contamination” between the fixed eye, and the other one (to be fixed this coming Thursday). Corrected blurry vision notwithstanding, I was shocked to see a nasty yellow-ish cast when looking through my right (unfixed) eye as compared to the pure and uncontaminated color perception of my fixed left eye. I’m very grateful that I use L a b to do initial color balance in my work. Finding what should be a neutral in the image and then getting the a and b channels to zero, at least as a starting place. My hanging prints looked even better than I could imagine through my fixed eye, and the difference when I closed that eye and only looked through my right eye was disturbing, to say the least. I think the principle of “memory color” must have been at play to some degree for at least a couple of years, because my work didn’t “look contaminated” to my unfixed eyes.
Then I got to thinking that after this coming Thursday’s surgery to correct the other eye, I’d no longer have the opportunity to close one eye and then the other to see the dramatic difference. So I took a printer test file into Photoshop and put a new layer on top. Then swapping eyes back and forth, and turning the layer on and off, I used the color picker and layer opacity to get an exact “visual match” to illustrate what the contamination from cataracts “looks like.” I had to do a global contrast adjustment and black point adjustment to get it “exactly right.” Then I saved the file ….
Here’s a side-by-side of the two. Straight print of the file on left, the “cataract version” on the right! I printed the side by side on 17x22 Simply Elegant Gold Fibre and am going to give it to my eye surgeon.
(This side by side is just a screen capture from the print module in LrC.)
Pretty remarkable. I’m thinking that a lot of the folk “doing these surgeries” never have the chance to really see what a difference they are making for their patients. They get lots of “stories” but I can provide “what it actually looks like” to at least this patient.
Hope you find this interesting.
Rand