Oh Wow! This Is What I Have Been Saying.

My right eye has a yellow tint to it and my left eye used to but not anymore. Why what happened? I got cataract surgery!

My Left and Right Eyes See Slightly Different Colors. Is That Normal?
I asked several visual perception experts to find out.
Vox via Pocket
By Brian Resnick

 I noticed it as a child.

If I close my right eye, the world just looks ... colder. White walls take on a very subtle blue or green tint. If I close my left eye, the world becomes a bit warmer, as if filtered by very pale rose glass.

The effect is extremely, extremely subtle. It's not like my eyes are covered with red-blue 3D glasses. It's as if someone pulled up a color slider in Photoshop and adjusted the hue in each eye by just one tiny notch. I'd lie in bed as a 5-year-old and play this game — closing one eye and then another — and find wonder in the weirdness of it.

This sounds odd, but I don't think I'm alone. The question of whether our left and right eyes perceive color slightly different pops up on Quora, Reddit, and other internet forums occasionally.

So I asked a handful of visual perception experts to find out: Is this real?

For me after the patch came off I didn’t notice it right away but over time I noticed that my right eye had a yellow tint to it. It was like “WOW! How did that happen?”

It's actually quite plausible that each eye sees color slightly differently

Overall, the experts replied, I'm not crazy (at least about this). It's very common to find a subtle but significant difference between the eyes on color perception tests.

And the answer is quite amazing!

The reason boils down to this: We're not perfectly symmetrical creatures. Just as the fingers on my right hand may be slightly shorter than the ones on my left, my left and right eyes may have slight differences.

Color perception is an amazingly complicated process. It's not just about the physical properties of light entering your eye through a lens. It's about the biology of the receptors in the back of your eye, and then the neural pathways that make sense of them. Small differences in any one of those areas can cause tiny differences in color perception.

For me it was the fact that the cataracts clouded up my vision and put a yellow tint on everything but you don’t notice because it slowly changes over time. We don’t notice but with the cataract operation it was sudden.

But what was weird was all my photos before my operation has a subtle blue tint because I overcompensation with the lack of yellow. Then I read the next paragraph…

"In general, the crystalline lens in our eyes becomes increasingly yellow as we age (primarily due to sunlight exposure), allowing less and less blue light to reach the retina," Jonathan Winawer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, writes me in an email. One eye could conceivably be yellowing faster than the other. (This probably isn't a factor in my case, since I remember seeing slightly different colors as child.)

For the most part, the brain can compensate for the physiological differences between the eyes, Don MacLeod, a UC San Diego psychologist who studies human vision, explains. "But maybe the compensation is not quite perfect," he writes in an email.

I had a color blind tech and he used to get so frustrated when you had to follow the squiggled lines on the page because he couldn’t see it. Being color blind got my cousin out of combat during the Vietnam war, we can’t have some trying to figure out which button is the red button to abort the launch in a combat situation.