I have started to need eyesight glasses (I am short-sighted) a while ago and I am puzzled by the fact that when I wear my glasses the color of the things around me are less bright than when I don't wear them. Why?
My eyesight glasses are not polarized.
Being shortsighted I needed glasses while growing up, but managed to avoid wearing them by cheating the yearly eye-tests at school. (While the tester was in the teacher's lounge drinking coffee I memorized the two bottom lines of the chart he left in the gym.) My best friend wore glasses and complained constantly that other people made fun of him and I would have avoided that at all cost.
College was a different matter altogether. Classrooms were so large that I could not see the professor's overhead projections. So I got my first pair of glasses then. I experienced the same thing you did when putting them on for the first time. Not only were colors more vibrant but everything was sharper. I was able to read traffic signs before reaching them. What I realized is that the colors did not change. The focus changed. So instead of getting a conglomeration of colors in fuzzy hues, individual colors became focused and clearer in and of themselves. They were no longer mixed together by our defective eye lenses. Hence, colors are sharper to us. But they didn't change. Color wavelengths are very precise and don't change. Our ability to see them changed.
John, My experience was just like yours. The first time I went outside with my glasses on (leaving the opticians) I was stunned by how much brighter and vibrant colors were: it affected all colors but greens and blues seemed to me to be the most vibrant. The sharpness of everything was also stunning it was as if I had been walking around in a monochrome world that suddenly became technicolor!
My eye doctor explained it by saying that since the image I was seeing without glasses was focusing before it hit my retina's the colors were basically being washed out because they were out of focus.
