Black blue white gold dress - what color is it?

Riker

This phenomenon is either a genius social experiment or a true glitch in the color recognition matrix.

I see the gold on top, white stripes, and a screwed up white balance as if it was shot at 3000K or something. Polls on big sites like Gawker swear by the black and blue. What the hell?

joethepro

I agree. Just looks like a bad WB on a gold and white dress. There actually IS a blue and black dress like this, but who knows if this was really it.

leonbeas

Come on guys is just a over exposed picture, with bad white balance with clipped highlights in the back so the eye is just trying to compensate for the color and brightness, regarding time of the day, light intensity and color balance, so your eye and brain is having a tough time with this unnatural visual stimulation. Its very uncommon to naturally see that situation in real life. Most probably there was a flash or other light source like a strong reflection, that caused this.

kellar42

Except that the dress is blue and black, and I've always seen it as such :)

karl

I guess this is the result of some bored students betting whether they could turn some irrelevant snapshot "viral" by just posting a ridiculous claim along with it. And sure enough, there's millions of gullible people out there on the "social networks".

If this was at least about some physical sample instead of a mere picture, one could argue if tetrachromats(*) could interpret the sample color differently. But certainly not from a JPEG...

(*) @Vitaliy: For some reason the Markdown interpreter does not allow to use the following URL as a link reference: http://web.archive.org/web/20120214002707

/http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf

joethepro

Im fine with the science of it tricking us etc, and I believe that it very possibly could be blue and black. But how could someone look at that particular picture and say its blue and black? I dont understand how so many people could interpret a pretty bright gold as.... black. I could maybe see the blue part because the white is a pretty cool white due to the exposure/white balance. But the actual colors in the image are gold and essentially white.

Sangye

@joethepro -- that's funny. I could say the same thing about people who see it as gold and white, when it so clearly and indisputably is black and blue. Goes to show.

matt_gh2

Interesting. On news they showed the dress in another setting and it was revealed to be blue and black, and for that picture everyone agrees it's blue and black. My question is, do the people that see the original pic as blue and black think that the original looks identical when comparing to the 2nd revealed blue and black picture of the dress?

karl

IMHO the much more interesting question would be what colors people would perceive if the dress had a woman in it such that you'd have a reference of a known color in the image, at the same over exposure and odd white balance setting.

(The two dogs have exactly the same color - as you can see when you cut them out.)

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion

blah_dogs

That dress has always looked very blue and black to me. I could see how some of the black looks gold because of the terrible white balance but the blue cannot be denied. Especially when I look at it with the waveform monitor in edius. If you see it white and gold try using some scopes or at least a color picker and then reporting back. Whats really strange about this situation is if you see it one way you will never see it as the opposite. Even when your color picker shows you blue.

leonbeas

@karl Thanks very graphic jajaja :-)

johnnymossville

Andy Warhol is working on a print to sell for a gazillion dollars.

v10tdi

What is interesting is when your perception of the dress colors changes. When I first looked at the original picture, I saw a blue/black dress. But with just a few seconds of observation, I could perceive white/gold. A few seconds more and it would flip back to blue/black.

I'm guessing my brain's auto white balance is off. :-)

peaceonearth

Riker

I believe this dress meme is a fabricated social experiment. :)

Two, I'm over one billion % sure that the dress is white, not just because of shitty WB and shitty image overall, but because I am yet to see any black fabric being photographed in a way that is reflects light like it's white.

Feel free to try it yourself, take a piece of any shiny black fabric you may have and try to make it look white - or to be more precise - shitty WB light blue-ish like the hue on the dress is.

Go ahead and try to make this https://secretsales-prod-product-images.s3.amazonaws.com/122390/b5aa3eb00f5ab97404bb155b5b733733_l.jpg - look white or blueish without using any selection-based layers or tools...only overall image corrections.

joethepro

@Riker You have it all backwards. The black and gold go together, not black and white.

Riker

http://i.imgur.com/XqUkEYl.jpg

like Magritte would say - it's not a dress. it's a picture of a dress. and if someone decided to screw up WB, I can't do anything about it. it's a white-gold dress, with tacky blueish tint. of course we could discuss for days if the shirt is actually black...but that's really not the point.

same like that famous SR71 Blackbird spy plane isnt actually black.

MirrorMan

I only saw white and gold, stared and stared and stared. Gave up. Of course it came up on various sites. Then at a certain moment BAM, black and blue. WTF. That was 2 days ago. Now I look at the photo above and its white and gold again. Optical illusion, it is.

ntsan

I always saw it as black and blue, how do I make it look like white and gold?

Howdy, Stranger!

Categories

Tags in Topic

Top Posters