Slashdot Mirror
Is That Dress White and Gold Or Blue and Black?
HughPickens.com writes Color scientists already have a word for it: Dressgate. Now the Washington Post reports that a puzzling thing happened on Thursday night consuming millions — perhaps tens of millions — across the planet and trending on Twitter ahead of even Jihadi John's identification. The problem was this: Roughly three-fourths of people swore that this dress was white and gold, according to BuzzFeed polling but everyone else said it's dress was blue. Others said the dress could actually change colors. So what's going on? According to the NYT our eyes are able to assign fixed colors to objects under widely different lighting conditions. This ability is called color constancy. But the photograph doesn't give many clues about the ambient light in the room. Is the background bright and the dress in shadow? Or is the whole room bright and all the colors are washed out? If you think the dress is in shadow, your brain may remove the blue cast and perceive the dress as being white and gold. If you think the dress is being washed out by bright light, your brain may perceive the dress as a darker blue and black.
According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. "It's entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It's seeing one reality, but knowing there's another reality. So you're becoming an observer of yourself. You're having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that's the basis of imagination." As usual xkcd has the final word. It would make the comments more informatively scannable if you include your perceived color pair in the title of any comments below.
According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. "It's entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It's seeing one reality, but knowing there's another reality. So you're becoming an observer of yourself. You're having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that's the basis of imagination." As usual xkcd has the final word. It would make the comments more informatively scannable if you include your perceived color pair in the title of any comments below.
This "____-gate" shit needs to stop. Now.
>"Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold"
Well, in my case, when I look at the photo in any light, on any monitor, at any angle, at any time, I have and have always seen only light blue and brown/gold. There is no situation where it is either "blue and black" or "white and gold".
The question is what we see in the photo, not what the dress ACTUALLY is- we can't know that because all we are allowed to see is a [poor] PHOTO of the dress, not the actual dress. And it is obvious the camera white balance and exposure is way off, trying to compensate for something, resulting in a photo with a probably very false representation.
Couldn't Slashdot post the image in the summary? I mean, it's not even like it'd be an illustration; this article is literally all about a specific image.
You can do it with annoying autoplaying videos, so why not a simple JPEG?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Dressgate? Seriously? Just kill me already.
I'm a graphic designer and photography enthusiast. I'm typing this on a NEC PA242W color-calibrated monitor, in a near-dark room. That dress is white and gold. the white part has a blue tint but I wouldn't call it blue. The colors look the same on my iPhone 5S. When I bring the iPhone outside, the blue tinge is more apparent (a short of light sky-blue) and the gold/brown turn darker, somewhat into the black category.
The different isn't in the screens, it's in your eyes, caused by environmental light. A sunny day at noon can be 100x brighter than even a well-lit room with floor-to-ceiling windows. If it's sunny in your location right now, try this: find a view point where you can frame both the sky and a patch of dirt land (no grass or foliage). Put the camera in manual mode, pick a shutter speed, manual daylight white-balance (6500K) and a low ISO, start with a large aperture (like f/4) and gradually step it down (like f/22). The sky will appear more blue and the ground will appear darker.
That's exactly what our eyes do. In darker places, the pupils open up to accept more lights, the highlights (blueish-white) gets push up to white but mid-tones and shadows are preserved. In bright places, the opposite happen: lower mid-tones and shadows are pushed to near-black, highlights are pulled down to reveal the blue accent.
Shitty potatophone camera fucks up picture, the internet loses its fucking mind over colors.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yeah, and that's kinda the whole point: everyone who looks at the photo is automatically (and completely subconsciously, without realizing it) applying color-correction to the dress, based on the brain's similar experiences with color-correcting and the visual clues in the picture. What makes the picture interesting is that it's so close to the edge between white/gold and blue/black that different people can perceive it differently, even on the exact same screen. Actually, I've seen it both ways, though I believe the picture that I saw as white/gold was ever so slightly lightened (based on a totally not scientific color picking of the blue areas). The picture was also a smaller version, which may have made the difference. The point is, the picture is a fascinating example of how what humans really perceive is not what they're actually seeing, but a heavily interpreted version based on context and various visual clues. In fact, humans would be effectively blind without that processing (imagine face blindness, but for everything you see).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton