For people with colorblindness, daily activities like choosing a perfectly ripe piece of fruit or the ideal color palette of an outfit can be tricky, along with an overall compromised sense of the vividness of the world’s hues. So, Microsoft engineers designed an app that uses a smartphone camera to help people with the condition distinguish color combinations that they would otherwise have a hard time telling apart.

Color Binoculars, available now on the App Store, applies a filter to the camera lens to replace troublesome color combinations, like red and green, with a combination easier to tell apart, like pink and green. The idea for the app came up during Microsoft’s 2015 hackathon, when engineers Tom Overton and Tingting Zhu developed the prototype.

“We read about special lenses that helped colorblind people distinguish colors,” Zhu, said in a company blog. “However, that’s expensive. So we thought, let’s code something on a phone for free.”

They started with a relatively straightforward goal: make reds brighter and greens darker. Overton, who is colorblind, said he saw an immediate improvement in his ability to distinguish colors. The team then took the prototype to the Microsoft Garage (the company’s project lab) and built it into an app that adapts to different common types of colorblindness as well as an on/off mechanism for the filters to compare what something normally looks like versus what those with colorblindness see.

The National Eye Institute estimates about 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women with Northern European ancestry have the most common form of color blindess. In most cases, it isn’t too disruptive to daily life (although a small percentage of the population does experience total colorblindness).

“Anything with red or green messes me up,” Overton said on the company blog.  “It’s not so terrible, but it does affect you. For instance, fall leaves don’t look any different for me than other leaves. They look like they always do. It takes a lot of color out of my life – metaphorically, that is.”

While the app can’t help in situations where colorblindness could be potentially dangerous, such as reading traffic lights or, say, flying a jet, it does help those with the condition experience more out of what they see.

“Whether it’s picking flowers for a loved one, experiencing the beauty of nature, or choosing matching clothes for your outfit, let Color Binoculars help you take a better look at your world,” the company states.