LadyButterfly she/herWho remembers this?
ZoldyckI’m still convinced this is the biggest troll. It’s clearly white and gold
You can literally sample the rgb values and see it’s blue and black
AlexisFRIt’s very clearly white and gold.
What is global illumination from sky lighting again ??
Carcinogenic.
You’re good. It’s black and blue. At a pinch, maybe blue and black.
realitistaWhere the hell is the black supposed to be? Nothing is that dark here.
Zagoratham I part of the joke here??? It’s clearly blue and black…
The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.
But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.
agamemnonymousThe lighting of the room is clearly yellow. The black stripes look to be a very glossy material, which when lit with yellow light reflects goldish. There’s no way that lighting turns a white dress blue.
See, it always looked to me like blue light (or maybe shadow), where the only sense it makes to my brain is that the fabric is white.
Whatever is to the right and behind the dress is definitely in bright yellow light.
Behind the dress, yes. No one’s disputing that. The difference between that bright light and the dress itself makes it look like it’s in shadow, at least to some of us.
Yes, and a room with that kind of lighting wouldn’t make a white dress look blue. Just the restaurant light from those surroundings proves that it can’t be in that kind of shadow.
The lighting of the room is clearly yellow.
That’s not clear to me. The dress looks like it’s in the shade.
Look at everything to the right of the dress, even to the left. Everything is illuminated with bright, yellowish light.
What room? It looks like we’re looking at the back of an object that’s facing out into bright sunlight.
Whatever the setting is, it appears to be bathed in bright sunlight. That’s the important part.
The front of it presumably is. But the back, that we’re looking at, seems to be in shade.
Light bounces around. That’s the whole point of ray tracing. Even if the dress were not in direct light, the light bouncing around the environment would prevent the kind of shade necessary for that.
“The phenomenon revealed difference in human color perception…”
Yes, you’re becoming a part of the joke. People LITERALLY see the dress differently. It doesn’t matter what the objective facts are. TBH, it says a lot about humanity. Even when we have evidence that subjective experiences can vary, and even contradict each other, we still end up arguing over whose viewpoint is “correct”.
That we’re curious problem solvers?
Anyway, science has determined that my way is most based
A study carried out by Schlaffke et al. reported that individuals who saw the dress as white and gold showed increased activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain. These areas are thought to be critical in higher cognition activities such as top-down modulation in visual perception
Speak for yourself. I’m a solvem probler.
clearly some problems need to be taken from behind
Solve me Daddy
I dunno. It’s clearly a blue and black dress in a washed-out photo.
I guess I’m just used to seeing washed-out photos, and mentally adjusting the “whitepoint/blackpoint” (I’m not a photographer) in my brain or whatever.
I have washed out Polaroids from my childhood, so. I don’t think there’s any great mystery here.
If you tilt the photo around on your phone you can start to see it turn black and blue. IIRC it’s because the phenomenon depends on the angle viewed at
Optical illusion innit
Hey, just arguing with you in a different comment chain now. So, like, I see the optical illusion. But the background is clearly yellow in the picture? So I don’t understand how your brain is interpreting that part? To me it seems like you’re ignoring the background of the image for this point. Can you go more in depth on that part, specifically? Does that yellow light look blue to you?
Looks like a sunny background and that the dress is in the shade
So the idea is that the dress is, what, covered in an exactly dress shaped and sized amount of shade? Or else why wouldn’t we see shade anywhere else?
Because shade works in 3D and it’s not clear how far away the background is from this picture. But yes, ‘dress shaped and size amounts of shade’ exist; trees, could be on a shaded balcony, etc.
Maybe I’m just an elevated being but I can clearly tell that the righthand side is a mirror on a wall and that the tan below it is where the floor meets the wall. Because of that, I can roughly make out the angle and know that we should be seeing some shade on the side if any existed in the first place.
Does that make sense?
No because it’s your subconscious, otherwise you’d have no problem understanding why it’s was ambigious. (Same applies for elevated beings - they can grasp differences in human colour perception).
And either way, even if your assumptions were true you still don’t know the angle of the sun, potential coverings, etc. You can’t predict the shade without that info so the logical choice would be to use the colours the pixels display.
The potential coverings would have to be exactly the shape of the dress because of the sleeves, no? We would see the shade passing underneath? Like onto the obvious clothing rack underneath the left sleeve?
No because you can’t see the floor underneath.
Looks like a fence with holes in it to the left, can see the sun through the holes in the distance.
Interesting.
Anyway, skill diff! See ya!
If anything, I’m more interested in how THAT color is being interpreted than the dress itself. Does it become shade to people because they perceive it relative to the dress? Because, I mean, we know that it is factually light. So how are people perceiving it to be the absence of light? Can you explain that bit?
The brain doesn’t just read raw brightness; it interprets that brightness in relation to what it thinks is going on in the scene.
So when someone sees the dress as white and gold, they’re usually assuming the scene is lit by cool, natural light — like sunlight or shade. That makes the brain treat the lighter areas as a white-ish or light blue material under shadow. The darker areas (what you see as black) become gold or brown, because the brain thinks it’s seeing lighter fabric catching less light.
You, on the other hand, are likely interpreting the lighting as warm and direct — maybe indoor, overexposed lighting. So your brain treats the pale pixels not as light-colored fabric, but as light reflecting off a darker blue surface. The same with the black: it’s being “lightened” by the glare which changes the pixel representation to gold, but you interpret it as black under strong light, not gold.
You can literally sample the rgb values
It doesn’t matter. This phenomenon can be explained by something called color constancy.
I remember some versions of this image where I could literally switch between perceptions at will, when I imagined different surrounding light temperatures/environments.
It’s a subjective perception.
I can literally switch between perceptions with this exact image. It’s sort of like that “are there six cubes or ten” illusion. Depending on how I look at it, I can see either one.
Exactly. Or that silhouette of a spinning ballerina. I can switch the direction that she is spinning at will as well. There’s nothing to go by because it’s a perfectly flat, projected silhouette without any shadows, so anybody is free to interpret the rotation however they like. 😁
You can sample the colours and see it’s white with a very light blue tinge and gold.
People who see it as blue and black are (correctly in this case) auto-correcting for the yellow light as the dress itself is black and blue.
Whereas people who see it as white and gold are (subconsciously) assuming a blue shadow and seeing the pixels as they’re displayed.
You selected the brightest highlights on the dress. I selected more average colors here.
I also included WHITE AND GOLD next to the selected colors, so you can see what they actually look like.
Well you would select the brightest bit to get an idea of the bit that was least impacted by the shadow.
But yes still closer to white and gold than (dark) blue and black
Color is created in the brain, not in the pixel values.
Pixel values often have no correlation to the color that’s produced in the brain.
TaiatariSame, I always assume the ppl. Saying it’s black and blue are trolling me.
Stop trolling me. It’s black and blue. I could never figure how people might perceive it otherwise.
They see the blue as shaded white, and the glossy black has enough yellow reflected in it that they think it is shadowy gold. Basically, you’re seeing the dress as if it’s lit from the front. You see the colors as blue and black, because that’s what’s on the screen. But other people’s brains decide that the dress is backlit, so the colors facing the camera are actually shaded.
PropaGandalfAnd you are obviously right. I can see it with my own eyes.
I’ve always really liked this explanation image you can find on Wikipedia page for it. Essentially, people who see white and gold are mistaking the lighting to be cold and blue-tinted, rather than warm and yellow-tinted.
The portions inside the boxes are the exact same colors, you can easily check this with a color picker.
sp3ctr4lYeah, this is the best explanation for why this ‘controvesy’ happened.
Certain background lighting conditions and colors can significantly alter the color and luminance of certain objects in that lighting environment, which otherwise, in less extreme lighting environments, look different.
Even just understanding basic color theory can show you how to make a color pallette out of either mutually complimentary colors, or highly contrasting colors… and how humans largely, though apparently to differing extents, interpret a total color space by comparing and contrasting the colors within that space to each other, as opposed to against some objective reference point of all possible colors.
The other part of this explanation is that…
People were not talking about the same image.
Someone would argue one way, another person argues another way, and then someone else would do some kind of photoshop job to argue for one side, and their explanation and reasoning and justification would get lost, and ok now you have multiple images spreading around and being argued over by the same population that would…
… in 5 years, essentially start a civil war over the idea of whether or not it makes sense to wear a mask during an epidemic of a virus transmitted in the aerosolized spittle from sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing.
Yeah that would never happen a war. Imagine of 3 groups of people worshipped the same God, just prayed to him on the floor, to a wall, and to the ceiling.- I’m sure they would get along and be super harmonious.
Track_ShovelAs in using the colour picker on the image and finding the corresponding code? That’s actually an explanation that I can get behind. Classic example of trust your instrument.
I see the dress as gold and white, no matter ehow hard I try to see the other side of the coin.
Nope. Color cannot be measured, it is created in the brain. Pickers show pixel values (stimulus) and often don’t correlate to the experienced color.
But you could use one I think, and then have that colour isolated and then dump it somewhere
You cannot measure perception with a color picker. Eyes + brain is not a measurement instrument.
Just like you cannot measure amount of salt used in a dish with your tongue.
Yup. Really you don’t even need the color picker, as the two horizontal bars seamlessly connecting the two dresses are there to show the same thing.
I think the most fascinating thing about this example image is that I can trick myself into thinking the dress on the left is gold and white. By zooming all the way in so that I can only see the black portion of the dress inside the box and then squinting, it begins to look gold to me. Then scrolling up slowly, the blue portion comes into frame and looks white. It isn’t until I zoom out that the illusion is broken.
I was once able to see the original image as black and blue (though I haven’t managed it today unfortunately), and its baffling how large of a difference it is. You’d think its like some bright sky blue or something, but no, its a deep blue like in the image I sent and our eyes are laughing at us.
Ah, so white and gold folks are, indeed, mistaken.
Thanks!
This has been known for almost as long as the picture has been around. Still doesn’t allow me to see it.
Incorrect. It is impossible to deduce the “real” color from the photo, both sets are true.
The photo is simply bistable.
You can argue that “the real dress bla bla bla”, but nobody’s looking at the real dress and everyone’s looking at the photo.
Very interesting. I wonder how big the effect of culture is on how people perceive this situation