News The dress color controversy.

[RGClark]

White and Gold ... No, Blue and Black: Internet Sees Different Dress Colors.
Feb 27, 2015, 8:32 AM ET
By BEN CANDEA, DAN GOOD and LUCIEN BRUGGEMAN

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/white-gold-blue-black-internet-sees-dress-colors/story?id=29261175

My guess for the source of the controversy:

To me the dress looks like a slightly pale blue. But the stripes to me look gold, though I'm told in the actual dress the stripes are black. I can't see that at all.

My guess for the origin of the different interpretations of the colors is that the sun is bright coming from behind the dress and this has a tendency to wash out colors. People know about this intuitively.

I think the people who can see it as blue and black are able to make this correction automatically, whether consciously or unconsciously. People who see it as white and gold don't automatically make this correction.

Bob Clark

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Somehow or another this made the "news" this morning. Seeing the dress in the picture I see white with gold lace, but the color quality is poor due to the exposure. If I stare at the bottom half, eye fatigue (just like the moving purple dot in some of the optical illusion pictures) makes the white transition to a light blue, and the gold darkens. But if I blink or move up to the top of the picture it goes back to white/gold.

Seeing the dress on television, is more like a cobalt blue with black lace.

I really don't understand why it's newsworthy. There's much more things going on to worry about.

 

[Artlav]

Assuming this isn't a hoax, i would guess the monitor makes a difference.

I tried it on a phone, and it is perfectly sharp blue and black.
On a big monitor it looks kind of weird, especially if you play with the colour temperature settings.

Couldn't get the "white and gold" effect yet.
Although, the larger the image, the weirder it looks.

 

[RGClark]

Somehow or another this made the "news" this morning. Seeing the dress in the picture I see white with gold lace, but the color quality is poor due to the exposure. If I stare at the bottom half, eye fatigue (just like the moving purple dot in some of the optical illusion pictures) makes the white transition to a light blue, and the gold darkens. But if I blink or move up to the top of the picture it goes back to white/gold.
Seeing the dress on television, is more like a cobalt blue with black lace.
I really don't understand why it's newsworthy. There's much more things going on to worry about.

It's news worthy because it is a (apparently) new optical illusion. For instance if nobody had seen this before, this optical illusion would be news worthy:

IF is true that some people can naturally see the dress as blue and black (the black part is hard for me to believe) then that would an interesting new fact in human psychology, that this capability exists in some people and not in others.

Bob Clark

 

[statickid]

It's a simple case of mistaking local color for the visual perception of warm/cool light/shadow.

I saw it as blue and black myself, mainly because it was a cheap looking bad photo. Cameras cannot easily (or not at all) capture the visual phenomenon that makes people think it is white and gold.

Then I saw some article showing how if you set the white balance of the photo to the dress color, it makes the fringe yellow. Well if you take the blue out of grey it becomes yellow/orange duh

 

[Artlav]

Aha.
Looking at today's xkcd did it:

I can now see it either way at will.

Also, apparently it is properly described as "white balance illusion".
So, if you print it out, get a camera and play with white balance settings, i'd expect drastic alterations in appearance.
Don't have a colour printer, however, and on the monitor it does not look too good.

 

[jedidia]

I see a washed out image and figure it's white and gold.

Gimp however tells me that the colors are indeed a lot darker than I would have thought. Which is interesting, because if anything I would have expected the overexposed background to let the colors appear darker, not brighter.

Which made some weels go click.

The glaring background is not the only lightsource. But assuming it would be the only lightsource, you would intuitively assume that the garment is brighter than it is on the picture, because you can see that the picture was taken against a lightsource.

However, this must not exclude that there is another lightsource shining on it, which would let the colors in the picture appear brighter than they are in real life.

The difference in perception ergo would come from one group of people unconciously assuming a lightsource shining on the garment, and one assuming that the glaring light in the background is the only major lightsource around.

My two cents.

 

[Artlav]

In case it's not obvious (and it shouldn't be):

 

[jedidia]

Oh, that was obvious, alright, but you ninja'd me :lol:

 

[orb]

In case it's not obvious (and it shouldn't be):

Well, it was already obvious, at least on a CRT monitor (set to R100%, G100%, B100%, but maybe a little darker / lower gamma than an usual LCD, as I see brown instead of gold). However, neither of them look like "black", so I don't know where did they get the black color from. It's blue-brown on the picture in the OP and on both stripes of the cartoon.

 

[C3PO]

Feb. 27 is officially a slow news day.

 

[fsci123]

That happened extremely quick...literally over a matter of hours. I didn't hear anything about at 10pm and then at 11pm everyone was talking about. It was like some sort of hypermeme.

 

[Andy44]

"Oh, internet, this is why we love you..."

 

[Pipcard]

It's news worthy because it is a (apparently) new optical illusion.

In case it's not obvious (and it shouldn't be):

I've seen [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion"]something like it[/ame] before.

 

[Hielor]

I get the blue part. But I don't understand how people are seeing black. The only possible way that the darker parts of that dress are "black" is if the dress has been through the wash too many times.

 

[ISProgram]

Okay, my take on this.

...

(insert title of thread) is stupid.

 

[Artlav]

I get the blue part. But I don't understand how people are seeing black.

Depends on the "filters" you enable.

Think of it as an overexposed image with front light, and you get washed-out-with-yellow black and paled blue.

Think of it as being backlit in the middle of a snow field, and you'd see dark-white with mis-reflected gold.

 

[meson800]

I can't see the black. Even in the xkcd image, it looks very dark orange. I see the apparent change in brightness, but still nowhere approaching "black"

 

[Hielor]

Depends on the "filters" you enable.

Think of it as an overexposed image with front light, and you get washed-out-with-yellow black and paled blue.

Think of it as being backlit in the middle of a snow field, and you'd see dark-white with mis-reflected gold.

Black doesn't become gold when overexposed...

 

[statickid]

The xkcd pic is on the right track but misses the mark by a hair.

I'd say the confusion is more related to the situation of these cubes.

Visual color continuity relies heavily on context. Neutral colors have the unique property of being warmer than cool colors and cooler than warm colors.

The problem with xkcd's example is that people swap the color without changing the color of the background.

In my example, the illusion originates in the neutral colors recorded by the camera lack information about whether its a backlit white or a dark blue being washed out by a bright, warm light. If the background wasn't yellowish, it might eliminate the illusion.

There is nothing new or novel about this discussion, the topic is covered academically in the field of artist's color theory.