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.

Comments

White balance and contrast in camera.

[Z00L00K]

It's primarily an effect of the camera fooling around with the white balance and contrast/light to try to get a correct image and failed.

Add to it that the picture looks different depending on which display you have on your computer and you have a nice debate.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jpapon]

From any angle, it looks blue to me. Very distinctly blue. I'm actually somewhat baffled that anyone (nevermind the majority of people) perceives it as white and gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jpapon]

The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white and gold, or at least grey and gold

I'm sorry, but it is definitely not. I just opened it up in GIMP, and the blue areas have hue values between 225 and 230. While yes, the saturation is low (30-40), that definitely still makes it blue, albeit a washed out blue.

Load it up in an editor and snip pieces of it out if you don't believe me, look at them on their own, compare them to color swatches

I did. It's definitely blue. Not highly saturated blue, but blue nonetheless. It's certainly not white/grey.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[markdavis]

>"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.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[beuges]

This morning, I saw it on my phone in my darkened bedroom, and it was clearly blue and brown. Just now, I opened the Washington Post link on my 24" screen in a sunlit room, and it was clearly white and gold. I then found the link that I had seen on my phone this morning (not Washington Post, so I wanted to confirm that it just wasn't two different pictures that I was looking at), opened it up, and it was white and gold there too. Went back to my bedroom and closed the curtains, and it remained white and gold for a bit, but after I left the room (after my eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness), it was blue and brown again. The picture on the Washington Post was also now blue and brown. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the sunlit room again (and the white Slashdot background), I switch back to the Washington Post tab, and it's white and gold again. My wife (who's now gotten fed up with following me around to look at this picture under different lighting conditions) has had pretty much the same experience as me.

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[grnbrg]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown.

But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[EvilSS]

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

Something is wrong. You said "pretty good explanation" but you then linked to Gizmodo. These two things are mutually exclusive.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Baloroth]

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).

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[serviscope_minor]

Well, I'd hesitate to call you colour blind since you are in fact correct. The dress really is blue and your brain is somehow undoing the mangling that's been done by the camera and lighting to arrive at the correct colour. I can't unsee it as white and gold however.

You can think of it all hinging on the blue/white stripes.

Objectively they're grey with a little blue in (check with a colour picker). All colour interpretation is ambiguous since you have do undo the effect of lighting and uneven colour sensors (eyes included). If your brain decides the light is white with a bit of blue, then that implies the underlying colour must be white and so the other colours must be gold.

If however your brain makes the call that it's strong orange light then that implies the stripes are in fact blue. That further implies the other stripes are dark grey, usually intrepreped as black.

There are other optical illusions designed to trigger this different intrepretation such as this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

What's unique about this is it's not made to trigger two different intrepretations in one person, but instead by chance triggeres quite evenly the different intrepretations in different people, leading to big debates.

For you, the XKCD one isn't extreme enough to push you in different directions. Interestingly high level intrepretation has a big part. I can't cite anything but I can give a personal anecdote. The other day I saw an odd green thing on the floor in my hotel room. It was actually my backpack lit with green tinged light, but was crumpled in an odd shape so I couldn't tell what it was. When I figured it was my backpack, I could no longer see it as green (the actual colour is black). I probably spent 5 minutes staring at it trying to re-see the green with no success. It's a good illustration that the brain uses information from all levels including high level information such as recognising a specific object that I know is in the room to intrepret light colour.

Perception

[Dan East]

First off, the picture is crap. It's overexposed and the white balance is off by a mile. My 10 year old Razr flip phone took better pictures than that.

However, there's still a human perception factor going on. I had looked at the picture on my laptop, and it was clearly white and gold. Then later I pulled the exact same picture up on my iPhone to show it to someone, and it looked black and blue. I then concluded that the picture looked different on my laptop than my phone due to differences in the display. When I got back home I pulled the picture up on both my phone and laptop to do a direct comparison, and both, including on my phone, looked white and gold again.

So I think it depends on whether your eyes are currently adapted to dim indoor lighting or bright outdoor lighting, in addition to the backlight on your device also changing the hue depending on if it's automatically full bright for outdoors or dim for indoors.

Re:Perception

[zoffdino]

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.

sigh

[s.t.a.l.k.e.r._loner]

This "____-gate" shit needs to stop. Now.

Slashdot can do video, but not an image?

[wonkey_monkey]

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?

Re:XKCD shows you

[Sesostris III]

The BBC also show the actual dress:

Optical illusion: Dress colour debate goes global

I see white and gold, although the actual dress is blue and black.

W&G, was Re:White balance and contrast in came

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

Why is it that my mod points always expire right *before* I want to use them? I used eight of fifteen purely on posts where I only sort of wanted to mod. I had to give up commenting to do so. Here, I log in so as to mod -- and my mod points are gone. And I have no real interest in commenting!

Grrrr.

Anyway, regardless of the general quality (or lack thereof) of gizmodo, this was a decent explanation. It points out that in the picture, the colors are pale blue and dark gold. However, the original dress is a darker blue and black. The colors in the picture are incorrect. People who see it as blue and black are seeing past the problems with the picture while those who see white and gold are being fooled by the bad colors in the image.

Actual dress is the blue and black one on the left in this picture: http://media.gotraffic.net/ima...