> The human eye is most sensitive to green light, so that channel effectively carries the majority of the luminance (brightness/detail) data

How does this affect luminance perception for deuteranopes? (Since their color blindness is caused by a deficiency of the cones that detect green wavelengths)

Protanopia and protanomaly shift luminance perception away from the longest wavelengths of visible light, which causes highly-saturated red colours to appear dark or black. Deuteranopia and deuteranomaly don't have this effect. [1]

Blue cones make little or no contribution to luminance. Red cones are sensitive across the full spectrum of visual light, but green cones have no sensitivity to the longest wavelengths [2]. Since protans don't have the "hardware" to sense long wavelengths, it's inevitable that they'd have unusual luminance perception.

I'm not sure why deutans have such a normal luminous efficiency curve (and I can't find anything in a quick literature search), but it must involve the blue cones, because there's no way to produce that curve from the red-cone response alone.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficiency_function#C...

[2]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-wi...

The cones are the colour sensitive portion of the retina, but only make up a small percent of all the light detecting cells. The rods (more or less the brightness detecting cells) would still function in a deuteranopic person, so their luminance perception would basically be unaffected.

Also there’s something to be said about the fact that the eye is a squishy analog device, and so even if the medium wavelengths cones are deficient, long wavelength cones (red-ish) have overlap in their light sensitivities along with medium cones so…

It’s not that their M-cones (middle, i.e. green) don’t work at all, their M-cones responsivity curve is just shifted to be less distinguishable from their L-cones curve, so they effectively have double (or more) the “red sensors”.