That white/gold or blue/black dress post is fucking me up because it’s making me question my ability to color and how others perceive the colors in my art.
Like what looks good to me might look completely wrong to other people? I remember doing that color test and…
I think part of what messes with people is that the dress appears to be backlit, and logically a backlit garment would be a shadowed out hue of whatever the colour would look like under neutral light, in yellow sunlight light, the shadowed white would look blue-ish and the gold would be brownish. But the dress is actually fairly washed out in the photo and appearing lighter instead of backlit, so it messes with what people expect. it’s like that checkerboard illusion where a white and black panel are actually the same colour if you directly sample them.
(I had a really hard time seeing the black and blue in the dress until I saw a picture someone found of the dress under normal light and my eyes like, adjusted to the lighting in the photo)
Okay so I actually took the image and adjusted it in an image program so it matched the colors a lot more closely to the real one
and now that I’ve done that ALL I CAN SEE IS THE BLUE AND BLACK IN THE ORIGINAL.
This is fucked up. I’m still left questioning how this reflects in specific use of color in art but either way what a fascinating experience given to us by a shitty camera.
The “Royal Blue” dress? Is not the one in the photo.
The explanation several news sites have used about “additive mixing” is just blatant bullshit. You can’t make black look gold without paint.
The blue people are seeing in the original is also very easily explained. Shadow makes white things look pale blue. Shadow does NOT make dark blue look white. Shadow makes dark blue look black. Shadow also does not make black look gold. Shadow makes black look black.
What we are seeing is either a discontinued older version of the same dress, in white, with gold lace, or we are seeing a dress that someone had altered with gold lace replacing the black.
Lastly, the illusion with the “A” and “B” squares above only works when there is sharp contrast immediately adjacent to the squares. Here’s the shadow illusion with the “A” and “B” squares each bumped up 250% in scale:
Sorry to break it to you, but it’s blue and black.
The photo is extremely washed out because it’s extremely backlit. (I see this shit a lot working in photo retouching) The blacks aren’t showing up well, because the photo is blown out.
Where there that there are shadows, but we don’t have any black blacks registering on the histogram.
Now, I’ll push the darks a bit and see what happens…
Good, we can see the blacks, and the blues are coming through clearly.
But, I’ll play with the levels a bit more…
And there we go. True colors revealed.
There is also a thing called white balance, if the camera selected a white point from the background, and the background is daylight, then the incandescent light reflecting off the lace is going to look extremely warm:
The blue areas of the dress reflect more of the daylight and suppress the orange light from the incandescent light and your brain reads “gold and white”
