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My experiences with color and light intensity differences after having lens replacement surgery...
I just had lens replacement done, and I had one eye done at a time, 1 week apart. So, for one week I was able to see the color difference between my OEM eyeball with early stage cataracts and my new, implanted artificial lens. While I was in this state I tried to measure the color differences between my eyes, and I'm writing here to document my perceptions in case it helps someone make medical or photographic decisions. I did a search for "cataracts" on this forum, and this recent thread came up, so I'm appending my experiences here instead of starting a new thread.
My Personal Case of Cataracts:
My cataracts were early stage. I don't know how to quantify this. So, to try to qualify how bad my cataracts were, I'm male (women tend to get worse cataracts, as I understand it), 57, and my cataracts were not considered bad by my eye doctor, by any means. The first time my eye doctor even mentioned me having them was when I was 56, and I had no idea at the time I even had them. As I understand it, everyone gets cataracts to some extent as they age, although not everyone gets them bad enough that it becomes "medically necessary" to have cataract surgery before they pass on. Also, I've worn glasses since middle school, and as long as I can remember eyeglasses have been supplied with UV coating. As I understand it, UV light exposure increases cataracts, so my glasses would reduce my personal UV exposure compared to someone who didn't wear glasses. Moreover, I've been reasonably active in my life, but I don't "live outdoors" -- so, perhaps consider me to be an average case in terms of UV exposure, minus the UV coating on my eyeglasses, for a 57-year-old male. That's me. Your mileage certainly *will* vary.
I had my lens replacement surgery to correct my poor vision. Once you're over about 50 years old, LASIK becomes less viable if you are going to need cataract surgery later anyway -- you can replace the lenses now, correct your vision, never develop cataracts, and you can typically still have LASIK later if you need to make a subsequent vision correction. The new implants I got are focusable by the eye muscles. As I understand it, earlier models (still used) were only focused to a fixed distance.
Testing Procedure:
As of this writing, I am 10 days out from the first eye surgery and 3 days out from the second. It takes about a week for the eye tissue to recover from the surgery and about a month for the brain and body to fully acclimate, so my results herein are not final, and I still have some inflammation even now. I tested the difference between the two eyes 6 days after surgery #1, right before I went in to surgery #2, to maximize acclimation of the first surgery.
I downloaded from Researchgate an image of a standard, 24-color, color reference card, used in a formal study on vision. The EXIF on the image showed the image was shot at 5000k. I loaded this image into dual panes in Capture One on my color corrected OLED laptop. I then alternately covered one eye and attempted to make color adjustments to one of the images in order to make the cataract view look like the implanted lens view. It turns out that this is much more difficult to do accurately than comparing images side-by-side.
Even for my mild case of cataracts, the color difference was dramatic. Cataracts (at least mine) appear dingy and yellow. In order to to make the cataract image pane appear like the implant pane, the adjustments I had to make were:
(a) 5000k (shot) adjusted to 2000k
(b) Tint adjusted -3 (i.e. toward green)
(c) Exposure adjusted +0.25 stop (this was particularly hard to gauge because the pupil instantly adjusts)
The most astonishing thing actually isn't how big the required corrections were, it's how amazing the brain is. It is NOT the case that my entire photo collection is off by 3000k. Instead, within the fraction of a second that it takes for the alternately uncovered eye to lock focus on the screen, the pupil is resizing to give the retina the right amount of light, and the brain is adjusting your internal perception of white balance relative to the other colors on the screen. All this happens so fast and automatically, that precisely nailing the necessary color adjustments by alternating eyes in this way is just about impossible -- at least it's impossible without some special equipment I don't have. (I also don't have Fred's military grade, special ops, cybernetic eyeballs crafted from stolen alien technology salvaged at the Area 51 crash site, but I did the best I humanly could.) My eye doctor says the implanted lens color is the "correct color." When Zeiss sells 80 kinds of optical glass, each with different characteristics, the term "correct color" has a different meaning to the kind of people on this board than it does to the average viewer. So, let's go with the terms "mostly correct" or "way more correct than by looking through cataracts." In any event, there is a dramatic, physical color difference incurred by aging that we don't normally notice because our brains adapts automagically.
Personal Results from Lens Replacement:
Before the procedures, I was developing presbyopia, I had dual astigmatisms, and my corrective lenses were -2.75 and -4.75 (nearsighted). The asymmetry of my two prescriptions was particularly disorienting, and I had slight triple vision in my dominant eye. I couldn't manually focus a camera anymore. I still have over 3 more weeks before I fully recover, fully acclimate, and find out my end results. With that caveat, I went in for post-operative exams the day after each surgery, and so far I tested 20/20 (barely) in one eye and 20/25 (couldn't quite read the 20/20 line) in the other.
I can focus at any distance, except very close. I can read without glasses, although so far it's still easier to read small print with low powered readers (atypically tiny print I can't read unassisted). I perceive a sort of hard stop at a minimum focus distance of about 11", which I hope will improve in time (I have reason to expect it might, applicable only to my case). As it is, closer than 11", things get bigger but not better. Also, there's a known side effect to the focusable implants that (almost?) everyone gets -- halos. It's described to the public as something that applies only to night driving, but what it really is is thin, concentric, diffraction rings visible around point-sources of light -- which is noticeable to most people only while driving at night, but it's present all the time. I'm only an amateur photographers, but I do pay attention to imagery in the way most people probably don't. For example, I saw the halo effect on the specular highlights off a chrome bumper yesterday. I notice the halos most on LED light sources because the emitter is so small. On a wider bulb, the diffraction rings are buried in the diffusion of the source. I had impaired night vision before the procedure, so it's not really worse than it was before, just different. (Holiday lights this year are gonna be psychedelic!) It's not terrible, and I'm told that after a while most people's brains learn to tune out the halo effect over time, but it is a known issue to be aware of before you have the surgery. I think halos only happens with the focusable lenses, but I didn't do a lot of research on the fixed lenses so maybe that's wrong.
This is the first time in decades I can really see well, and without the inconvenience of having to go find a pair of glasses to stick on my face. For me, even if I don't see further improvements in the coming weeks, it's not an exaggeration to say that having the lens implant surgery has been nothing short of life changing.
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