We were at an art museum once and there was a painting that was just a bunch of rectangles of different colors. She thought it was the most beautiful thing ever. So I got her a small print of it and she was disappointed. I’m sure the print was a CMYK printing of an RGB picture, so it got down sampled back to three channels. It looked the same to me as the original.
God help us when we go pick out paint for a room in the house or try to color match a fabric. She has word visceral reactions to colors that just doesn’t make any sense to me.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-really-test-if-I-am-tetrachr...
My theory that I've pieced together: The Y chromosome codes for 1 piece of the information and the X codes for 2. I'm sure it's not linear, but the quantum mechanic in me says that the color receptors are a linear combination of the three basis functions encoded on the DNA. For women their system is over determined, and I bet the green is really a degenerate solution that _usually_ overlaps. But in some cases the green is extra wide or even two district peaks. It also can explain why men are more likely to be color blind, if one of the 1 drops out, they only have two channels remaining. Women tend to have a back up.
Here's a real question for her on the subject, how does she see a blacklight? I expect a true tetrachromat to see it nearly white. But also I wonder if she's sensing a fluorescing that is of sufficiently short wavelength that standard vision can not perceive it.
The implants I have in each eye are different technologies. The right eye has no UV filter, the IOL in the left eye does have a UV filter. When I look at a blacklight with my right eye, it's bright, almost white in appearance.
But looking at the blacklight with my left eye, it looks like what most see, as a very dark purple with almost no visible light.
A friend of mine is an artist who has been experimenting with extreme metamerism, using pigments that radically change perceived color under different light sources, including of course, blacklight.
Since you mention hiking, I wonder if some of the plant life you and your wife encounter have any florescent properties, or perhaps interact with some fungus that does... A portable UV light at night might be interesting...