Yes and no. While you're right on the technical details, colour vision is a bit more complicated than that.
Red-green "blindness" comes in two flavours: protanomaly (red deficiency) and deuteranomaly (green deficiency). Both can vary in their severity.
I'm deuteranomalous, that means I don't perceive green as intensely as someone with normal colour vision. Basically, green always appears much less saturated to me, whether it stands on its own or as part of a hue. This also means browns will appear more "red" to me.
Additionally this means I find it much more difficult to tell "similar" shades of red and green (and the various hues in between) apart, especially when the surfaces are very small. I think this has to do with red and green normally having a difference in luminosity and me relying on the luminosity as an additional "hint" when processing the colours.
Also note that the reason many men with colourblindness remain entirely unaware of it is not that they aren't affected by it but that there simply isn't much awareness of it in popular culture.
My maternal grandfather was a photographer and would often ask his wife for opinions on colour matching and had a tendency to pick atrocious colour combinations for his clothing, but he never thought of himself as being colour blind.
Although there were a few hints in my childhood that I'm colour blind (e.g. painting trunks and leaves in the same colour, using green as a skin colour when painting "brown" people, mixing up blue, purple and turquoise a lot, having difficulties with colour coded maps on the overhead projector) the only reason my parents became aware of it being actual colour blindness (rather than just childish quirkiness) was that we did a couple of health tests in elementary school that included an Ishihara test.
Note that I never had trouble telling apart the colours on traffic lights either, although I must say that with the newer traffic lights that were introduced during my childhood I noticed the green having become much fainter (because they are brighter). It's only now that I've begun driving that I notice that green traffic lights at night frequently blend into the scenery alongside the fluorescent street lights.
Protanomaly is relatively rare, though. Deuteranomaly is the common one, and is invariably what people mean when they say "red-green colorblindness".
For anyone wandering by, the full spectrum (pun intended) of things that tend to be called "colorblindness" is:
* Deuteranomaly: most common by far, involves mutated γ-photopsin shifting the peak and range of the "green" response further toward "red".
* Protanomaly: more rare, involves mutated ρ-photopsin shifting the peak and range of the "red" response. Similar effects on ability to distinguish colors, but also "darkens" the far red end of the visible spectrum toward black due to the way it shifts response.
* Tritanomaly: even more rare, involves mutated β-photopsin shifting the peak and range of the "blue" response. Is the only one of these three which is as prevalent in women as men, though, due to the way the genetics works out (deuteranomaly and protanomaly would require a woman to get the mutation on both X chromosomes).
Taken together these are called "anomalous trichromacy" conditions -- all three types of color photoreceptor proteins are produced by cones in the eyes, but not the "normal" forms of each, resulting in a shift of response.
Then there are the dichromacy conditions, where one set of color-distinguishing cone cells is basically completely lacking:
* Deuteranopia = no "green"
* Protanopia = no "red"
* Tritanopia = no "blue"
Deuteranopia and protanopia again affect similar ranges of the spectrum, but protanopia again "darkens" the far end. And tritanopia is, once again, equal prevalence in men and women due to the genetics.
Finally there's monochromacy, where either there are no cones at all (no color, just shades of grey, and usually drastically reduced visual acuity), or only a single type of cones (shades of that color + greys, better visual acuity when in good lighting conditions).
(for a non-technical term I much prefer "green weakness" since it doesn't have the OH MY GOD YOU CAN'T TELL RED AND GREEN APART AT ALL connotations)
(and personally, when I do have problems with color, it tends to be in that yellow-y/beige-y/earth-tone-y bit of the spectrum, much like your experience, and so I wish people would be more careful with those rather than caring about whether red and green are different enough colors)
I don't know about you, but I do tend to get a laugh out of explaining to people that, yes, green blindness means I can't see the colour green and therefore am able to see through walls if you paint them in the right shade of green.
Red-green "blindness" comes in two flavours: protanomaly (red deficiency) and deuteranomaly (green deficiency). Both can vary in their severity.
I'm deuteranomalous, that means I don't perceive green as intensely as someone with normal colour vision. Basically, green always appears much less saturated to me, whether it stands on its own or as part of a hue. This also means browns will appear more "red" to me.
Additionally this means I find it much more difficult to tell "similar" shades of red and green (and the various hues in between) apart, especially when the surfaces are very small. I think this has to do with red and green normally having a difference in luminosity and me relying on the luminosity as an additional "hint" when processing the colours.
Also note that the reason many men with colourblindness remain entirely unaware of it is not that they aren't affected by it but that there simply isn't much awareness of it in popular culture.
My maternal grandfather was a photographer and would often ask his wife for opinions on colour matching and had a tendency to pick atrocious colour combinations for his clothing, but he never thought of himself as being colour blind.
Although there were a few hints in my childhood that I'm colour blind (e.g. painting trunks and leaves in the same colour, using green as a skin colour when painting "brown" people, mixing up blue, purple and turquoise a lot, having difficulties with colour coded maps on the overhead projector) the only reason my parents became aware of it being actual colour blindness (rather than just childish quirkiness) was that we did a couple of health tests in elementary school that included an Ishihara test.
Note that I never had trouble telling apart the colours on traffic lights either, although I must say that with the newer traffic lights that were introduced during my childhood I noticed the green having become much fainter (because they are brighter). It's only now that I've begun driving that I notice that green traffic lights at night frequently blend into the scenery alongside the fluorescent street lights.
EDIT: Here's an article showing the world pretty much as I see it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928770