Colour Blindness Simulator
See how your photo looks to people with colour blindness, or how your edit reads to viewers with normal colour vision.
About 1 in 12 men sees colours differently; for women it is 1 in 200. Red and green become the same tone. A red jacket disappears against a green background. That colour accent in your street photo that ties everything together simply does not exist for part of your audience.
Tab 1 shows how your photo looks to people with colour blindness. Tab 2 is for photographers who are colour blind themselves: how your image reads to people with normal colour vision, useful as a reference when editing.
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If you are colour blind yourself, you see your photo through a filtered eye. This simulation shows how someone with normal colour vision experiences your image. Use it as a reference alongside your own view when editing.
- Red jacket on green grass? Always test. For ~6% of men and ~0.5% of women those are the same tone.
- Colour as the only compositional element? Make sure tonal contrast carries it too.
- Editorial or commercial work: check that infographics and charts stay readable without colour.
- Work with RGB numbers via the colour picker in Lightroom or Capture One, not by eye.
- Skin tones follow fixed ratios: red > green > blue. The per-channel histogram tells more than the combined one.
- Temporarily set saturation to zero and edit on tones. Then you see what everyone sees.
Colour Blindness Simulator: how it works
The colour blindness simulator shows how your photo appears to viewers with different types of colour vision deficiency. Use it to check whether colour contrasts in your image hold up for a wider audience, or to understand what others see if you have colour blindness yourself. Upload a photo, pick a simulation type, and compare.
Which types of colour blindness does this tool cover?
The simulator includes deuteranopia and protanopia, the two most common types, where green-sensitive or red-sensitive cone cells are absent or impaired. Together they affect roughly 8% of men. Tritanopia, a blue-yellow deficiency, is rarer but included as well.
The output is an approximation. Colour blindness varies between individuals, so the simulation gives you a representative view rather than an exact match for any one person.
When does this actually matter for photography?
A red subject against a green background pops for most viewers. Under deuteranopia, that contrast collapses almost entirely. If your composition relies on that separation to work, a large portion of your audience misses it. Running a quick simulation tells you whether the image still reads.
For a related check, the Colour Analysis tool breaks down the dominant hues in your photo, which can help you spot colour dependencies before you run the simulation.
Frequently asked questions
Does colour blindness affect how judges perceive my photo in a competition?
It can. A significant share of the population has some form of colour vision deficiency, and jury members are no exception. If your image depends on a red-green contrast to communicate depth or subject separation, that read may be weaker for some judges.
My edit uses a teal and orange grade. Does that hold up for colour blind viewers?
Teal-orange tends to survive most simulations reasonably well because the contrast is partly luminosity-based, not just hue-based. Run it through the simulator to confirm, since the result depends on how you've applied the grade.
Can I use this to check accessibility before sharing a photo with colour-coded annotations?
Yes. Upload a screenshot or export of your annotated image and step through the simulation types. You will see immediately whether colour alone is carrying meaning that some viewers will miss.