See your photo through animal eyes
Roughly how a dog, cat, cow, mouse, dolphin and other animals would see it, a bee’s false-color map, and eyes from evolution.
Slide toward night to compare you, a cat and a dog at the same light.
Two types of cone instead of our three. Blue and yellow stay clear; red, orange and green can look much alike. How Dogs See Color
Animals today
Eyes from evolution
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How this works
Each picture comes from the same code as the simulator on that animal’s page. Dogs, cats, deer, horses and cattle have two types of cone instead of our three, so the simulator shows colors on a yellow–blue axis plus lightness, and blurs the picture to the animal’s sharpness of vision. It is an approximation; each page explains its limits and lists its sources.
Mice and rats see ultraviolet and green; a photo records no ultraviolet, so their pictures are gray. Dolphins have one type of cone and cuttlefish one visual pigment, so theirs are gray too; the cuttlefish is not blurred, as we found no measurement of how sharply it sees. The housefly picture shows only the blur of a still scene and leaves the colors as they are.
The bee picture is a false-color map of what its blue and green receptors would catch, not what a bee sees: a photo records no ultraviolet.
Eyes from evolution are the stages of our Evolution of vision page, drawn with its numbers and code; that page takes a picture as about 60° wide, and lists the sources for each stage. The small prints are worked out from a reduced copy of the photo, so blur is easiest to see in the large one. The sample scene is drawn in code.
Night mode, for you, a cat and a dog: a photo does not record how brightly the scene was lit, so the light slider assumes how brightly the white in your photo is lit, in candelas per square metre. Color gives way to a gray drawn from each eye’s rods, following the weighting of the CIE system for twilight light measurement (CIE 191:2010, computed as Gao and colleagues describe in 2017), the same for every eye; using it for color is our assumption. Your rods’ gray follows the CIE night-vision sensitivity curve; the cat’s and the dog’s follow a standard visual-pigment template (Govardovskii and colleagues, 2000) at their rod peaks. Sharpness falls to the limit Kang and colleagues (2009) found for cats and people alike, 4 cycles per degree at about 0.004 cd/m², and lower below it; between 0.004 and 5 cd/m² the sharpness is our interpolation, not a measurement. Grain grows as the light falls. The cat’s eye optics gather about 4.8 times more light in the same study, so its grain is about 2.2 times weaker (noise falls with the square root of the light caught); the dog’s grain is set equal to yours, because it was not measured. Brightness and grain are illustrative.