Visual Perception, looking at Tetrachromacy & Colour Blindness

Is your perception the same as mine? There are the extremes of Tetrachromacy & Colour Blindness that create unique abilities and problems, but for the rest of use it does raise questions of how we perceptive colour.

Looking at developmental neuro-science for a child I assume that the neural pathways in the visual cortex that handle colour perception are formed early on. Our brain makes the links between the perceived colour and the linguistic label for the colour. So it seams extremely unlikely that the pattern of neurons that formed the visual cortex are identical between people.

Tetrachromacy (tetra = four, chroma = color) in humans is a visual oddity which allows the perception of 100 millions colours (See this from IFLS). This is a boon for artists, like Concetta Antico who can see the colours to produce them in art. (BTW her website has a few pages on Tetrachromancy including a Preliminary report of her ability and the genetics involved) It appears to be X-chromosome-linked, so it will be more common in women, but still exceedingly rare.

On the flip-side there is colour blindness. I’ve used colour-blindness tests to head head off potential visually based problems with assessment. To ensure that it is a fair assessment, based on student skill and accounting for disability.  There is Color Vision Testing Made Easy, which as a bunch of images online, and there is the EnChroma Color Blindness Test an interactive online test and a mobile app. Disclaimer: Neither of these should replace professional expertise.

Resources

About Ballistic Publishing

Ballistic Publishing have a good range of art books covering areas like Matte Painting, Concept Art, Character Modelling & Design, Game Art. The really good thing they do is provide an online copy you can flip through to determine how appropriate it is for a school.

The Creative Essence Series which started with The Face provides a good foundation in how to create the human face on computer in 3D. It starts with the reference photography moving through modelling, UV mapping, texturing and finally into rendering. Aimed at mid-to-advanced artists it will need to be supported with a range of activities to reach this goal. I did trial this in year 11 VET Multimedia class to limited success.

Inspiration can be found in each book in the d’Artiste series which covers one of a range of digital art subjects with the aim of being an artist master class, the Exposé Series which is a yearly collection of fine artworks from around the world, and the Exotique Series which focuses on beautiful CG characters.

These books are best suited to senior visual arts students as a way to inspire and to provide ideas & examples

Adobe CS2 for free

I’ve just found out via FB that Adobe have made the entire collection of CS2 software for free. The Creative Suite includes Premiere Pro and After Effects for video editing, InDesign for magazines & books, Illustrator for graphics & line art, and of course Photoshop for image & photo editing. It does not include Dreamweaver, which become part of CS3. Of the package the biggest score is Photoshop, which has dominated the photography industry.

However, this grab bag of software does have some caveats, addendums, and cautions. As old software, it is no longer supported, so the current operating systems will be less capable of running is as the hardware improves, and the software will be more vulnerable to malware. So use at your own risk.

Adobe has disabled the activation server for CS2 products, including Acrobat 7, because of a technical issue. These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.

Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. The serial numbers provided as a part of the download may only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products.

The specs, mean that is should run on anything from this century, or at least the last decade.

  • Mac OS X v.10.2.8–v.10.3.8. PowerPC® G4 or G5 processor
  • Microsoft® Windows® 2000/Windows XP. Intel® Pentium® III or 4 processor

 

Download: Adobe Creative Suite 2