What colour is this dress?
polycounter lvl 3
I'm sure you've probably already seen it, but can someone tell me what colour this dress is?
To me it's clearly white/gold, but to others it's blue/black.
Any experts able to explain it?
Some links if you don't believe me:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/02/some-people-see-this-dress-as-white-and-gold-while-others-see-black-and-blue/
http://swiked.tumblr.com/
To me it's clearly white/gold, but to others it's blue/black.
Any experts able to explain it?
Some links if you don't believe me:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/02/some-people-see-this-dress-as-white-and-gold-while-others-see-black-and-blue/
http://swiked.tumblr.com/
Replies
Also:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B-0X2hJUcAI2dHh.png
Also:
http://swiked.tumblr.com/
It literally is blue and black. Here it is from the store and its royal blue
I mean the white does have a slight blue hue, as if it's picking up ambient light from the sky through a window or something, but that's it.
The second image in the second link though, in which someone is actually wearing it, it does look black and blue there. Like a totally different dress. Which I'm assuming it is.
My current favorite explanation is
"Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There's rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part. The "cones" see color. The "rods" see shade, like black, white and grey. Cones only work when enough light passes through. So while I see the fabric as white, someone else may see it as blue because my cones aren't responding to the dim lighting. My rods see it as a shade (white).
There's three cones: small, medium and large. They are blue sensitive, green sensitive, and red sensitive.
As for the black bit (which I see as gold), it's called additive mixing. Blue, green and red are the main colors for additive mixing. This is where it gets really tricky. Subtractive mixing, such as with paint, means the more colors you add the murkier it gets until its black. ADDITIVE mixing, when you add the three colors the eyes see best, red, green and blue, (not to be confused with primary colors red, blue and yellow) it makes pure white.
Blue and Black: In conclusion, your retina's cones are more high functioning, and this results in your eyes doing subtractive mixing.
White and Gold: our eyes don't work well in dim light so our retinas rods see white, and this makes them less light sensitive, causing additive mixing, (that of green and red), to make gold."
And by the way it's blue and black, anyone seeing it white and gold is being fooled by the terrible terrible potato quality photo and overblown lighting in the back.
Idiots arguing over something they don't understand.
PLZ STOP.
Because people think having eyes is the same as understanding colour and light.
Very interesting. While the original image looks white/gold to me, that screenshot, of the same image, looks blue/black.
Our eyes have soft clipping for over exposure, so when things get bright, they tend to stay relatively the same hue.
When ccd's in cameras clip, you get hard clipping, so you get wild hue variations and saturation boosts that don't exist in the physical world. Mix that in with buggy white balance and you have an alien image that is a different interpretation of the world.
And when you get an alien image, our pattern recognition systems don't all act the same.
It's called 'Do you see what I see' and it's all about the perception of color.
It's consistently more blue in those areas.
OMG IS IT TWO FACES OR A CANDLE STICK???
OMG WHICH WAY IS IT SPINNING????
WHICH WAY IS THE PENIS TANK FACING
Colour is just more subjective, because our eyes are such inaccurate instruments.
So those people that see it as blue/black. When you look at the colour patches above- do you see those ALSO as blue/black or more sky blue/brown?
Those other optical illusions - I agree with blazed - you can prove to yourself that they could be one or the other. For other colour optical illusions - you can objectively demonstrate that it is indeed an illusion by measuring RGB values. The only problem is that when I do measure the values for this one - I still get the same answer :poly142:
(Francois_K - penis tank made my day!)
that being said, it seems like much of the discussion is based around peoples perception of the photograph, in which case I'm not sure how the heck people are seeing black and blue like the photo examples posted earlier in the thread. Seems like an extreme case of relative color.
I wouldn't think that should be the case if it's just an issue of the whole producing an optical illusion.
Yes those RGB values are blue and dark brown to me. Are you telling me the people who see it white/gold are also seeing the same colors in photoshop with the color picker? That can't be right because that would mean anyone who percieves it that way would have the color in their art look completely different to someone else.
Imagine going to a meeting and you're deciding the color of a game characters pants to be blue but the other person sees it as white. That doesn't sound right at all.
@bounchfx
I see that square in the middle to be orange/brown in both comparisons, but the dress is blue/dark brown to me.
The dress others are seeing is a very deep royal blue and pitch black.
that example is for value (as the orange is not on any color, but grey and white), I only shared it as reference for what I was speaking about when i said relative color, it reminded me of those exercises. There's definitely color ones online too, not just value.
The last time people argued about a "blue" dress this much the American president was nearly impeached.
Now that was interesting to watch.
It really is like that rotating girl thing. The endless prattle on Twitter today has been annoying, but I've got to admit that is a little bit interesing.
I took into account into what I was just doing, then realized, it's totally just a symptom of where/when someone looks at the image. not really any different from those off color 'stare at it a while then look at a white wall' but in reverse.
When I first looked at it, I've been browsing the web for a while, and mainly looking at dark colors. When I looked at it just recently, I had just finished two rounds of counter strike, both in very brightly lit environments. So I tried a test. It was currently 'blue/black' to me, so I opened photoshop and looked at just the dark UI for 30 seconds or so. The dress was back to gold and 'white'. Then I filled my canvas with a bright 'sunlight' color, and did the same thing. Now the dress shifted again.
so yeah.. honestly pretty minor, and I think it's hilarious but interesting how it's become such a 'thing' so suddenly online. If anything it just tells me what kind of lit environment the viewer was in when he/she reported their take on the colors they saw.
edit: forget what I said, this is cooler
Viral things aside, I learnt something new today regarding colour theory and how our eyes work. So thanks for the thread.
That gif seems to have made it "click" for me. So the objective colours are the sky blue / brown combo that most people see, and that you can read out as RGB. However you can imagine that it is actually a darker blue with black stripes, and the lighter shading is just a reflected orange light from a glossy material. Both underlying possibilities give you the same observation.
tl;dr - The observation is indeed sky blue / brown, but there are multiple different plausible scenarios that produce that same observation.
The way to "prove" it to someone, like other optical illusions, would be to setup two scenes that look visually identical, yet have totally different lighting and materials. Then display them from a 3rd perspective where the differences are clearly visible.
According to local news this morning it is supposedly known from the original source ( the actual dress in question ) that the dress is indeed blue and black.
What is interesting is that the illusion seems to go past simple mistaken relativity. Where even some of the saturated exaggerations do not go far enough for some people to recognize the dress as simply a blue and black ( dark brownish ) that was photographed a bit overexposed and blown out.
Still seeing a white and gold dress ( wedding dress white and gold lame gold! )
over 72 percent surveyed see the dress as gold and white.
I think a poll on an artist centric forum like polycount would show that on average more of us would recognize a blue and black dress ( compared to the current reported average )
Kind of depressing that all the care we would take to maintain color fidelity might be lost on a majority of our audience?
I wonder if an IPS monitor would make a difference on that 72 percent seeing a white dress?
( considering the vast majority might not have accurate color display )
What bothers is not so much wether or not the dress is black and blue or gold and white, but rather, the willingness of many to argue so vehemently for or against it. Had the original product image not been found, it would have been perfectly fine to just say "I don't know" - because there was indeed no way to know, considering how overexposed the picture was.
I suppose this is what to expect from a world where many people don't understand the difference between "could care" and "couldn't care" and call a projected video of 2Pac a "hologram".
That being said, it is interesting from a photographic standpoint. We do tend to represent colors as what we know they are (like comic book colorists would do, with the Spiderman costume always being red and blue regardless of lighting conditions) whereas this picture is a good reminder that it takes much more than that to simulate a photographic look.
The profile being dropped could very well be a possibility, but if that's the case the whole discussion becomes pretty much void of any meaning, because anyone can embed a crazy profile into any picture. I honestly doubt that any phone camera would go crazy with exotic profiles though ...
It's also a testament to how shitty that camera sensor is that they could possibly get these pixel colors out of a photo of a dress that we know is actually very blue and black. Simple overexposure shouldn't produce the tones shown in the fabric without the sensor being seriously terrible.
This is an interesting case of color constancy and the way our eyes perceive things. I think lots of people are talking about it because it's a subject that doesn't come up much. It's interesting.. don't know why a few people in this thread are so butthurt that people are talking about it.