You can't distinguish between red and green. I wonder what you see when you view a red versus what I see. Are you seeing a red, a green, a gray or something else? In the spectrum of colors for red, I see a warm color, more intense than yellow. Can you distinguish between a red and a yellow or a gray?
Red-green color blindness means that you are poor at sensing the red in colors or poor at sensing the green in colors. It doesn't directly mean that you can't tell red from green, although with certain shades that's often the case. Compared with what people with normal vision see, someone who doesn't sense green or doesn't sense red will confuse various shades of red, orange, yellow-green, and green with each other. They will also see purple, violet, and lavender as blue. The world's palette simply has fewer choices.
When people don't sense green, colors are still as bright but some of them are sensed wrong. It's because the green-sensing cones aren't working or are sensitive to a range of wavelengths that's shifted away from green toward the red side.
When people don't sense red (like me), it's the red-sensing cones making the mistake; they don't work or their sensitivity is shifted toward the green side. For some reason, colors also look dimmer to these people. If you find it harder to tell colors apart at dusk than in bright sunlight, you're having the problem that I have all the time.
So is colorblindness a camera issue (eye) or a software issue (brain), a combination, or they don't know?
In almost all cases it's a camera issue. Rods and cones are our sensors and when they don't work you get less information collected at the source. If your digital camera's CCD worked for some wavelengths but failed for other wavelengths, you'd have the same problem.
Certain rare types of head injuries can cause color blindness too, by damaging the neural paths that send color sensations to the brain. In that case it's not really a "software" problem (a brain-processing malfunction) but more like a network failure.
One question, Doctor Q might be able to answer, are there any racial aspects to color blindness? Are some races more vulnerable than others or immune? I don't have anyone in my family that I know of that has any color blindness, so I doubt I carry it. I will have to ask my wife if her family has any issues.
Color blindness is genetic, so by chance it's occurred more often in some populations than others. Red-green color blindness affects about 8% of Caucasian men but only about 5% of Asian men and about 4% of African men.
If people have a very minor deficiency in color perception, they may not notice it in daily life. They may become aware of their minor color blindness only when they fail a color blindness test (one of those circles with the dots). On the other hand, if they have a major deficiency they'll know they are color blind because other people refer to (what they see as) one color by two different names. Since I see purple as blue, I observe that people use two different words (purple and blue) to describe the same color (blue).
Women are rarely color blind, since the recessive trait is inherited on the X chromosome. That means that a man with one "bad X" will be color blind while a woman with one "bad X" will not. She'll just be a carrier, passing along the gene to half her children. Women are color blind only if they have two bad X's.
