What your dog sees
A photo, or your camera, shown in the colors and detail a dog sees. Nothing leaves this device.
Choose a photo or use the camera to see it both ways.
Worked out in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us.
Colors, side by side
Each color as you see it, above, and as a dog's two kinds of cone see it, below.
- Red
- Orange
- Yellow
- Green
- Blue
- Purple
- Pink
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How we show it
Dogs have two kinds of color-sensing cone where people have three, most sensitive at about 429 and 555 nanometers (Neitz, Geist and Jacobs, 1989). Blues and yellows stay distinct, while reds, oranges and greens fall together into yellows and browns, much like red-green color blindness in people. We show it with the standard simulation of that kind of color vision (Viénot, Brettel and Mollon, 1999).
Dogs also see detail less sharply: about 20/75, where 20/20 is normal for a person (Miller and Murphy, 1995). We blur the picture by that much, taking a photo to span about 65 degrees, the view of a phone camera. So the blur is gentle: it is fine detail that goes soft.
What a photo cannot show
Dogs do better than people in dim light, see flicker faster and take in a wider view (Miller and Murphy, 1995). A photo cannot show any of that, so we do not try.
Sources
- Neitz, Geist and Jacobs, "Color vision in the dog", Visual Neuroscience, 1989
- Miller and Murphy, "Vision in dogs", Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1995
- Viénot, Brettel and Mollon, "Digital video colourmaps for checking the legibility of displays by dichromats", Color Research and Application, 1999
Questions
Are dogs color blind?
Not completely. They see color with two kinds of cone instead of three: blues and yellows clearly, reds and greens much less. It is close to red-green color blindness in people.
Why is the picture only a little blurry?
Because 20/75 is about fine detail. Across a room, the difference shows in small things, like text, rather than in the whole scene.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The picture is changed in your browser, and a camera picture never leaves your device.