Goddam! Thank you!
That kind of explains the gold or black dress!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
I can for the life of me only see it as white and gold, and I have really struggled trying to understand how others can see it as blue and black? I bet the picture you show here is a result of the research the picture of the dress initiated. It can’t be a coincidence that the illusion you posted also is made with dresses.
I’ll never understand how anyone can possibly see white and gold. You can literally see untinted yellow in the rest of the shop. If the dress was behind some heavy blue filter then how could the rest of the shop be such an overexposed yellow?
You can literally see untinted yellow in the rest of the shop
It’s in a shop? It looks like massively blown out bright sunlight looking out through a doorway. I literally cannot comprehend the idea that anyone actually sees it as blue and black. And I’ve always been pretty good at being able to flip my brain to see either interpretation of other optical (and auditory) illusions.
Even if it was looking outside, sunlight is white. If the color temperature was so off that the sensor recorded white as blue, then sunlight would appear blue as well
Maybe this version with a minor correction to color temperature will help
Because the image is gold and a shade of blue that you can get from white if your white balance is bad enough.
But if the white balance was that far off, then the rest of the store wouldn’t be that shade of yellow
It’s such a strange thing. For most of the illusions I can trick my brain to perceive both variants. This one is clearly black and blue. I can see that the black parts isolated can appear golden in the light, but for the life of me I can’t see it any other than blue. Brains are weird.
I wonder how much of this depended on the differences in device screens. In 2015 there was a lot more variability in display technology, lower resolutions in general and worse color fidelity. OLED was uncommon and expensive, you probably only had an IPS display if you worked in graphic arts, and a lot of people were still using standard LCD monitors backlit with fluorescent tubes, which meant that the black depth was limited and the detail in dark regions of an image was frequently not visible on the screen.
I remember showing a woman at work it, from my phone. She saw it as the opposite to me and another coworker. Me and the other coworker were stunned.
Just looked up the origonal dress pic on my pixel 8 pro. Its still white and gold to me. I’ve only ever seen it as black and blue (without aid) a handful of times since the day it went viral. In sure screens could influence this, but this damn thing stands as a powerful illusion on its own.
In the drawing, the surrounding background and the hard black lines on the lighter version are probably causing that we don’t compensate the light in the same way in both drawings. We are not given the same picture like it happened with the original photo.
Brains are weird.
Yes and they are extremely flawed too.
The only reason we think we are smart, is that every other life-form we know of is even stupider.To be fair, we’re the ones who makes the definition and therefore can make them fit our, in many cases, fragile ego. We’re only the most intelligent animal because our definition of intelligence is based on our self.
True, luckily many modern researchers are less biased. A lot of the bias is from religions, that claim that humans are special.
From modern research we now know that we are not special in many many aspects. Apart from being a bit more intelligent, we are clearly the same in more ways than we are different.
The dress was revealed to be, in fact, blue and black.
On 28 February 2015, Roman Originals announced that they would make a single white and gold dress for a Comic Relief charity auction.[31]
Oh man, MAJOR missed opportunity there! They sold out of the blue and black ones like overnight, they should have fast-tracked a white and gold version production to hit the shelves ASAP and enjoyed the flood of purchases.
Yes that’s kind of part of the link I gave.
But if you take a color picker, you can clearly see the RGB values from the image to match white and gold.I did the color picker thing too, and its result was blue and orange. Not super helpful to this particular global controversy, but was worth a shot.
IMO the color of the actual physical dress is kinda moot: photographed (poorly), digitized, and presented to the world on billions of screens with completely different settings for things like color saturation, and the color of the thing that hits our eyes is not necessarily indicative of the color of the original.
The color of the dress in the photo was not the same as the color of the photographed dress.
It was white and gold! sprints away
It was a whole thing in my lab when it went viral, and I wasn’t on any social media at the time, so someone brought up the picture and asked me what colors I saw, and I said “blue and goldenrod, why?” I still see a light blue and a goldenrod, almost orange ib the fucked-up viral picture.
😋
Anyone with eyes and half a brain would know from the original photo 10 years ago it was black and blue. You can see the severity of the contrast in the photo that would suggest the colour was manipulated.
I still cannot believe this many years later there are still people so absolutely disillusioned that they see “White and Yellow”.
Get your eyes checked, people.
Huh, I checked the talk page out, turns out the guy behind the picture was jailed for trying to kill his wife.
It was only after following elaborate instructions: change the brightness, squint, and cover up this section of the image, that I was finally able to see a white dress.
As stupid as it was, it was a pretty cool accidental worldwide psych experiment.
when I clicker the link I saw it as black and blue for a split second but all I see now is golden and white 😭😭😭😭
This is what finally helped me see black and blue:
That has both interpretations, but it didn’t help. I’ve never been able to see white and gold.
So, in the video, when you looked at this:
You saw a dark black and a navy blue? Or is it only in the context of the full image that you’re seeing it as dark black and navy blue?
Correct interpretation: blue and black in an overexposed image
Misinterpretation: yellow and gold in an underexposed image.
The area of the picture that isn’t the dress is washed out in white and the overexposure is even bleeding over top right corner.
Anyone misinterpreting must either be bad with visual context or not understand photography.
Because obviously it’s impossible to take a photo with an underexposed foreground object and overexposed background.
My issue with this illustration vs “the dress” is that in the dress, the background is bright, not a darker blue.
In theory, this illustration just serves to show that nobody should be seeing “the dress” as white and gold. Thy do, and that breaks my brain, but I still feel that there is no logical way for that to be justified (and yes, I read all the research).
To my brain, it could only be white & gold (in reality I mean) if it was in drastic shadow. I iust imagine it not in drastic shadow and it looks blue & black.
I don’t understand why people are arguing about a terrible picture. The colours are blown out. So you could misinterpret them as badly lit white and gold.
Were arguing. This happened about 10 years ago, so keep the quality and variance of computer monitors at the time in mind. That, and the average person doesn’t know what color balance/contrast is. Plenty of people don’t even realize that the same image can look different on two different monitors.
Perception is an element of intelligence, and a fundamental part of consciousness.
The original dress really was
whiteblack and blue. For some reason, I thought it was confirmed otherwise.Apparently this is the same dress, the colour balance of the one on the left is just that fucked up.
This is the one. People made some color edits to make it more obvious too. That being said I’m still suspicious of anyone who looks at the left picture and can only see black and blue… No way José. I can’t convince my brain to see it even when I know it’s there.
I can’t understand anyone who can look at the left dress and think that it’s a dark picture in the shadows.
All the “explanations” basically say the same thing. Those dress shades appear to be white/gold in the context of a dark or dimly lit room.
Which the photo clearly is not. It’s so damn bright the entire background is washed out, and light is even spilling over from the background over the dress.
I know the explanation very well but none of it can me make it see black and blue. It simply does not look black and blue to me no matter how much context I have. Believe me, I’ve watched videos dissecting it back when it went viral. None of the context can rewire my brain here and I’m not alone with this one.
I guess it depends. Are people looking at the left image and going “Yep, that is definitely a dark black and navy blue”? Using a colour picker, the darker areas show up as somewhere around #7a6642, which definitely isn’t the black #231e16 we see on the right. Same with the lighter spots: we’re seeing something around #8596bb, which again isn’t the navy blue of #3a45c3
Quite simply, I cannot make the dress in the left image look like the dress in the right, even if the dress in those images are supposed to be identical.
According to the other comment replying to me, apparently some people see the picture and instinctively think “black and blue” because the background is bright. I can’t see it and never will.
Which is why I tried asking other people who saw black and blue what black and blue they are seeing. The image on the right shows a deep black and navy blue, something I just do not see reflected in the left image.
The Salvation Army in South Africa did an advertisement (to raise awareness against violence against women) showing a yellow and gold dress and it’s closer to what is shown in the image than what is shown in the original. Presumably, they wouldn’t see that dress as black and blue.
Reread the wiki page about it. The dress was black and blue.
Wait. For real? I WAS RIGHT?! I was under the impression that I saw it wrong.
Wikipedia says the original dress was blue/black.
tilt your phone until almost parallel to ground and look at it from eye level
I tried, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. But thanks anyway.
this does it for me but I guess depends on the phone screen
I still don’t get it
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Historians are gonna really wonder why so many people talked about this
I mean it is a legit philosophical argument. One of my mother’s friends, whom I respect very much, told me she saw gold and white. So there is some merit to the conversation.
whom I used to respect very much
FTFY
I shit you not. When I first saw it, my eyeballs were probably primed for daylight and I saw white and yellow. Ever subsequent time I saw black and blue. Reality is subjective.
I have always seen gold and white and still can’t see black and blue.
Human vision is an illusion. It’s mostly inferred, and not representative of how the world actually looks, and I think that’s pretty cool and profound.
Please explain how the world actually looks
I don’t think there’s an objective answer to that
I had to copy the image in Paint and select the colors to believe they were the same. Goddamned witchcraft, I say!
Paint is compromised, they are in on it!
The one that always gets me is the light/dark image that has the same grey in two places, and on one side it looks like darkness and on the other like light.
Basically, these: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=grey+illusion+light+dark&ia=images&iax=images
I hear Yani
Definitely green needle
This pic makes my brain go “AHHHHHHHHHHHHh”
and they were roommates
Mouth been craving
Oh come on, not this again
i hate this, take my upvote.
Anyone else see green and pink
I don’t even understand the point of this. I see a black dress with a blue apron and a yellow dress with a white apron. Is that wrong?
Turn your phone horizontal (with locked orientation), now put one finger from your left hand and one finger from your right hand to the areas above outside the boxes.
Voilà! The boxed areas are the same.
Ohh, the boxed areas. Okay, I see that the boxed tan color looks darker next to black and lighter next to yellow. I’m not seeing this effect on the boxed bluish color. I thought the point was to show why some people thought the original black and blue dress was white and gold. That’s okay, doesn’t matter.
The blue and the yellow are the same color (cover up the rest of the picture, there is no gradient in the bar). Same thing for the white and the blue, isn’t that strange?
No, when I cover up different areas I see black and blue or yellow and white.
The top and bottom are still uncovered so the illusion is still operative.
Let me be more clear - I cover the ENTIRE IMAGE except for like an inch opening, and it’s still eiher black/blue or yellow/white. I can otherwise see the whole color spectrum quite well, so I dunno what’s going on but that’s how it is. Not a big deal though, I read up on the original dress thing and my curiosity is satisfied, but thanks for replying.
No, you’re absolutely right.
These people either have some medical condition they need to see an optometrist for, or are literally just trolling.
What do you think the image is trying to show?
You’re clearly supposed to see the two dresses as different colors. The actual illusions are the rectangles. They even have lines between them so you can see the color doesn’t change, yet one apron looks white and one looks blue.
I just tried it together eith my GF. She doesn’t see the colors change. I block out the blue and they become gold/white to me. Doesn’t work the other way around seemingly.
No I was looking at the wrong areas. To me the tan area between the lines looks darker on the left (next to the black) and lighter on the right, next to the yellow. Ok, but I don’t get how this is supposed to explain why people thought a blue and black dress was white and yellow. Doesn’t matter tho.
It’s essentially highlighting the ambiguity the colors can convey. Because our eyes don’t see in isolation from our brains, we don’t see based on the actual reflected color, but based on the contrast between those colors and context clues. We essentially have white balance and color correction baked into our vision,which is part of why photos without that look weird. Lacking context you process the colors differently.
In this case people saw a blue and black dress and lacking visual context they either compensated for sunlight or the compensated for shade. The contrasts involved (black/white, blue/yellow) are because opposite compensations maintain contrast while changing brightness.
This image has someone wearing the dress photographed with the white balance specifically off so that you can maybe see what other people were implicitly correcting for.
I don’t get it. Are they suppose to look similar with the filters applied? I see both dresses underneath the filter, very clearly. On the left is the same black and blue dress with a yellow filter effect, on the right is a yellow and white dress with a very clear blue filter on top.
Yeah, don’t worry, you’re supposed to be able to see they’re different.
The majority of the image being grey is gives your brain the right context required to perceive each half is being tinted, so the perceived white balance isn’t shifted around like in the original “the dress” meme.
This is more of a teardown of the “original” illusion than a demonstration.
Looking at the bridge, it becomes clear that even though you can see in the wider context that the dresses are separate colours - when compared directly under skewed/tinted white balance they become indistinguishable.
Meaning that in the original “the dress” meme, how you perceived the dress’ colour depended greatly on how you perceived the tint/white balance in the surrounding areas of the photo (or how it was displayed on your device).
I’ve seen the dress on multiple different types of screens and it has literally always looked blue and black.
Yeah i am with you. I never understood how anyone saw gold.
Sorry, I’m team gold. We’re real! I’ve never seen blue in the original image.
So, when you say that you never understood how anyone saw gold are you
a) Seeing an extremely washed out image and compensating
or
b) You are literally seeing a solid black and a navy blue i.e. there’s basically an insignificant amount of difference to your eye between the black part of the dress and #000000If it’s the former that might explain some of the difference in opinion, if it’s the latter then I have no idea how I would manage to interpret it as black.
I could get my brain to see it differently by adjusting my phone’s brightness and viewing angle, but it wasn’t as voluntary as other illusions (like the Ben10 figure one)
I even messed with my phone’s blue light level and still no change.
I have a hypothesis that the dress just shows that lots more people have some weird issues with color. Not necessarily outright color blindness but moreso just general processing issues. But what do I know I’m just some asshole with photosensitivity.
The first couple times I saw the dress I saw it as white/gold. But after learning it was black/blue I stared at it and the colors seemed to shift in my brain. Now I can’t see the white/gold for the life of me.
Adding a bit more context, the bridge doesn’t just show they are indistinguishable, it shows they are the exact same color.
If you put a color picker on each dress, you’ll get the exact same RGB value.
The point is that a black-and-blue dress, when brightly lit, will look eerily similar to a white-and-gold dress, when it’s in shade.
Ok, i just dont see it then.
It’s a demonstration of how tinting can make two different colors appear the same. Zoom in and you’ll see it
Left vs right:
Holy shit.
Holy shit, what? Both colours displayed are the exact same colour.
I don’t see it either. I still see it clearly as black and blue on the left and gold and white on the right, even with the filter they are trying to apply overlaid.
There is nothing to “see”. They are, on your screen, identically coloured on the left and right in the “boxed” sections.
Yes, they look different to you. They are not actually different colours. That is the optical illusion.
Yes, but the black and blue is actually exactly the same color as the yellow and white. They’re both the same color but one looks black/blue while the other looks white/yellow.
You got it backwards, the point is they look different but are actually the same colors
This actually helped me.
I have no idea what must be wrong with someone’s eyes to call that dress white and gold. I mean it was always a stretch, the shadow/lens on top of it would have to be fucking BLUE to color it something similar.
Even then it sounds stupid to go with that stretch of it being white and gold.
My working theory is that people who saw it gold and white were exposed to lead.
I feel like this post illustrates pretty cleanly how someone would see that
The background is not blue in the original though?
People view the image in different conditions. There’s so many factors involved. How bright your surroundings are, the make and size of your display device, how you perceive colors. Professionals perform color grading to avoid ambiguity like this in movies and such. Even your cultural expectations are hypothesized to change how you perceive the dress. (Eg. living in a desert environment can make you expect more yellow shading)
There’s a similar illusion called the spinning dancer, where some people simply cannot see the image spinning one way or the other, while some can even switch between them. There’s more information in the dress to make an objective assessment, but if that information isn’t observed or obscured by the aforementioned reasons, it’s totally understandable. That’s what OP’s image is showing.
Exactly lol. The rest of the scene had clear context that the image was overexposed and the white balance was too warm.
Anyone that understands photography instantly understood what was happening in that image. I’ve had people try to fight me and tell me I’m wrong about that, but I’ve been a professional photographer/videographer for over 15 years. Quickly identifying a technical issue with an image like that is like breathing to me. I do it every single time I take a picture, so over 10,000 a day on average. All I can say is trust me. that image was overexposed and too warm, You can tell by the way it is in the background, and if you can’t see that then my words won’t help you.
Shadows do generally overrepresent the color blue due to rayleigh scattering.
Brains are also very quick to make assumptions and also very rigid about keeping them. The spinning dancer illusion, even when you already know you can and have seen it spinning both ways, it can be difficult to switch percepts.
I get the illusion with the blue radiograph halfway down, but I’ve never been able to easily switch the dancer.
Sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. When I looked this up earlier, I was able to switch twice. But yeah, if I’m just staring at it, it’s basically impossible.
I switched the first time because I looked at the reflection underneath the dancer, and that seemed to remove just enough visual context that I could reorient my perception.
I struggle to see it as black and blue, the white and gold interpretation has been the one I’ve almost always seen
It’s not a stretch by any means
Have you called your optometrist in the last 5 years?
That you still think the issue is in the eyes instead of how the brain interprets the colour means you have an understanding problem.
I was exposed to lead and yet I only saw blue and black.
There goes my theory! Damn! :)
I was able, very briefly and not since, to see white and gold. Otherwise, I thought they were all crazy.
Same! I wish I could flit between like I can with most illusions. I’m just happy I know I saw it the other way once at least.
It’s a weird type of illusion because even knowing the truth I can only see the white and gold, even when the lighting in the photo is adjusted to correct the overexposure my brain still reads it as white.
Delta P
This kills the crab.
