Your dog’s gaze darts from a brown squirrel to a red bird. And then back to the squirrel. Then, to a yellow tennis ball, sitting in green grass under a blue sky.

This scene looks brilliantly vibrant to your eyes, but can dogs see color like you do? How well do your pups see the world around them?

Dog vision, like eyesight in many animals, has advantages and disadvantages. What their vision lacks in some areas, it makes up for in others.

 Knowing more about how dog vision measures up to human vision can help you better understand exactly what dogs see.

Are dogs color blind?

Dogs are technically color blind, at least in human terms. But being color blind doesn’t mean they only see in black and white.

Like most colorblind people, dogs can still see some colors.

Dogs can see the colors yellow and blue, as well as some shades in between. They can also see shades of violet and gray.

What dogs see is similar to how the world looks to a person with red-green color blindness, the most common grouping of color vision deficiency in people.

Online tools such as this image processor let you find out how one of your own photos would look through a dog’s eyes.

Why dogs only see certain colors

A dog’s eyes see different colors than human eyes do, thanks to millions of microscopic cells called cones.

Cones are stationed along the retina, the thin membrane in the back of each eye. Cones have two specialties: color and fine detail.

When light strikes cone cells, they activate and send signals to the brain.

There are a couple of big differences between these cells in dogs and people:

• A dog’s cone cells register two colors, but a human’s cones respond to three colors: red, green and blue.

• Dogs’ eyes have far fewer cones than humans’ eyes do.

The blue and yellow cones in a dog’s eyes allow it to see about 10,000 different combinations of color. The average human’s red, green and blue cones may be able to process up to 10 million combined colors.