Show HN: Opinionated Dress Color Simulation
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I'm honestly a bit surprised that this whole thing is confusing and dividing so many people. This seems like a straightforward demonstration of Color Constancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy) and the distinction between local color and perceived color (http://practicalpainter.blogspot.nl/2010/05/local-versus-per...). I had thought that this kind of thing was more widely understood outside art education, but perhaps I'm wrong.
The short version is that the dress could be either and the photo doesn't really give enough context to say anything definitive. The longer version is that all color perception is relative. Light of a particular makeup of colors hits an object, it absorbs and reflects different amounts at different frequencies, and that's what hits your retina. Our brains then attempt to "reverse engineer" the "local color" of the object by comparing it to the surrounding light (presumably because local color is more useful for identifying and discriminating objects), and that's what we "perceive". In normal conditions we do this really well. But when you strip out the context, our brains keep trying but are easily fooled.
James Gurney tends to do an excellent job dissecting this phenomenon:
* http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.nl/2010/01/color-constancy.html
* http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.nl/2012/11/yellow.html
* http://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Guide-Realist-Painter/dp/0740797719/Can you see what assumptions the gold/white crowd is making in their interpretation? Even with the slider in the OP I can't see it. :) And even worse: I can't understand what assumption I need to make (about the color of objects in the background or shadows or something) to be able to see a gold/white dress.
Phrased differently: I can't imagine how I would construct a scene with a gold/white dress and then take a picture that looks like the one in the OP (regardless of the position of the slider). Scary! :)
https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3452082/n...
Objectively, there's only "yellow-brown" (gold) and "light blue" which most people "mentally" correct to "white"
http://s4.photobucket.com/user/ometauru/media/YNOPKWp_zpstcv...
Looking at the different things around and behind the dress, everything dark has a similar golden color. Maybe some people correct that to black in the same way most do with the light blue to white
light blue/gold barely gets a mention in most articles.
nobody is arguing that the perceived colour of the dress is black.
Phrased slightly differently: The yellow-brown (gold) color is most visible on the upper torso where the fabric (to me) is likely to reflect a light source specularly. On the lower part of the dress (where I assume) light is more ambiantly reflected I see black.
Looking at your color squares to the right it's quite clear to me what my visual cortex is doing: It's assuming that specular reflection expains the difference in color in the left column. So each color there is a superposition of two: the ambient color of the dress and the specular reflection of the light source. Separating those two gives me black dress and yellowish lighting.
UPDATE After writing the above I think I understand why it seems so weird to me to see white: I parse the light source as yellowish, so a white dress would never look blue in that light. To me seeing a white/gold dress requires contradictory hypothesis: the light source needs to be blue to explain bluish tint on white stripes; but it also needs to be yellowish to explain the "gradient" in gold/black stripes from top to bottom of the dress.
When i turned the picture upside down with the light source in the back now at the bottom, which couldn't be the sun anymore, my perceived color changed from very very light blue to blue instantly. And now I can't unsee it:)
I find it funny that the HN crowd is arguing over this, given how in our line of work, I'm sure many of us have looked at an image on several different devices and have seen different shades and colors. Someone's monitor might have a higher contrast setting than your smartphone. And you're condescending to someone for perceiving a color that isn't objectively there.
Hope this helps.
Now I see blue and black if I view the whole image or bottom 2/3rds of the image, and white and gold when viewing the top 1/3rd of the image.
I put an orange light in my bathroom so that night-time visits won't affect my sleep more than necessary, and notice that the cap on my antifungal powder bottle, which I know to be orange, reflects that light as a similar color to the bathtub, which I know to be white. If I put the bottle on the tub, I can flip-flop between deciding that the bottle-cap is white, and that the tub is orange. When doing so, my perception of the colors change. The orangeness appears to fade in and out.
Not so with this picture. I can't push my brain to accept any other conclusion than the slider is changing the color of the illumination from blue to yellow, and the dress color is constant.
What people see depends on monitor quality. Most monitors are nowhere close to neutral, and cheaper monitors still aren't neutral even after calibration.
But on top of that, colour perception is notoriously individual. Men and women have different colour perception, and many men are somewhat red/green colour blind.
FWIW, personally I have trouble seeing this as a white/gold dress.
I could imagine that there are two effects at work.
1. My brain has some kind of caching-error when I slowly slide the fader to the right as it refuses to update all information necessary to see the real colors. (not white and gold but the actual blue tone)
2. The bright white spot on the right hand side is sort of a focal point. When you look at it first it alters how you perceive the rest of the picture. (causing an afterimage-like effect)
if 1 doesn't happen (i.e you see the photo of the right hand side first) and 2 does happen, then the picture looks white/gold (to me)
White snow looks gold under the sunlight
Your brain controls for these effects (mostly) and you still think 'white snow'
I can. To me, this initially looked like a situation where the background is lit with incandescent bulbs with the dress being in sunlight. In a photo where you have parts of the scene that are lit with incandescent bulbs and other parts are lit with sunlight, correcting white balance for the incandescent part of the scene (yellow -> white) will make anything that's white in the sunlit part of the scene very blue. That's what I was seeing here.
I can say that, in my case, there's been a fairly strong correlation between my own ambient lighting conditions. I've only seen white/gold in well-lit settings and I've only seen blue/black when I was laying in bed with all the lights off. Whether that's coincidence or not I cannot say, but I felt it was an interesting data point.
Since the invention of artificial illumination (starting with fire), humans have had access to multiple light sources, which may be of different colors and coming from different directions. The default illumination model is insufficient to handle this without ambiguity.
This phenomenon is also used for dramatic effect in The Abyss, wherein the only light source available in the bottom of an oceanic trench is a monochromatic glowstick, and to disarm the nuclear bomb, Bud has to cut the blue wire with a white stripe and NOT the black wire with a yellow stripe. The actual wires used in filming were both black with a white stripe.
- "surprised that this whole thing is confusing and dividing so many people"
- "the dress could be either and the photo doesn't really give enough context to say anything definitive"
I have used the same two arguments to explain why this hype appeared in the first place, and why the "scientific" analysis many people try to follow is conceptually wrong. Blog post and corresponding discussion can be found here:
The average color of the gold/black part is #6e5d4d, which is brown/gold. The average color of the white/blue part is #9298b0.
White/blue composite: http://i.imgur.com/DvhPP7v.jpg
Gold/Black composite: http://i.imgur.com/aIFUWgE.jpg
Image color analyzer: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/color_summarizer/?analyze
If I take a picture of a flag and then in photoshop rotate the hue 180 degrees I'll get an aqua-ish and gold-ish-green flag. http://imgur.com/HkzeCU2 The fact that the original flag was red and blue is irrelevant. The image itself is aqua-ish and gold-ish-green
I do get a gold tint on the black, for sure, but if I were asked the colors of the dress, it's still unquestionably blue & black, the whole photo just looks like it has a sickly yellow tint on it.
Edit: I should have said I get the gold tint when I slide the slider to the yellow (right).
I want to know what some tetrachromacic people see.
The funny thing is, this morning when I first "got it", the blue was very light, and I've been looking at the original tumbler throughout the day and I swear it's getting darker blue every time.
Now I can't even see the white and it's kind of blowing my mind. I remember the WTF moment when people said it was blue/black and only seeing white/gold, but I just can't reverse it and see it again.
Making the image smaller/cropped/etc doesn't really change that, for whatever reason. Maybe my brain is remembering the context.
I too was looking at this and thinking, "How can anyone say that that dress looks white and gold?" I could only see blue and black.
I went outside to get lunch, came back, got yet another dress picture in my social feed but lo, it was white and gold...!
My immediate assumption was that I had seen a doctored image but having gone back to this post, where I previously could only see blue and black, I could now only see white and gold.
My hypothesis is therefore that the type of light you've recently been experiencing influences how your brain interprets the colours in the dress image.
Going from daylight into artificial fluorescent lighting gives White/Gold. But, after some time under fluorescent lighting it turns Blue/Black. For me this hypothesis is somewhat supported by the fact that now that I've been back inside for 20 minutes the dress is Blue/Black again.
This was a trio of rooms which were saturated with either blue, red or green light. On entering each room everything appeared tinted with the colour of the light. However, after 5 minutes the brain had restored the perceived balance to normal. You could entirely forget that you were in a colour saturated room.
When moving to another of the rooms the effect began again but with everything tinted whatever colour the new room was saturated in before gradually adapting back to "normal".
I think this supports my above hypothesis. The brain takes some time to adjust to new light sources and will skew perceived colours for a short time after changing the ambient light source.
[1] http://www.designboom.com/art/carlos-cruz-diez-circumstance-...
When I saw the actual picture of the dress in good lighting I questioned my sanity. :)
The shirt in the sun is white, the shoulder in the shade is blue. There's enough info in this image that everyone should be able to mentally balance the whites. In the case of the dress, some are applying this white balance without a strong reference point, others are not.
This is not a screen issue. Multiple people physically in the same room looking at the same screen see different things.
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that it is an instance of this optical illusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
This demonstrates that the brain literally sees different things, on a completely pre-conscious level, based on contextual assumptions.
If you assume that the scene lighting is warm/gold, you see a blue/back dress. If you assume the scene lighting is cold/blue, you see the white/gold (I am unable to do this, personally).
My opinion is the picture is just terribly poor quality. Maybe that has something to do with it.
"I think my brain is interpreting the bluish part as a white surface reflecting some indirect blue light."
I personally can under no conditions see "white and gold", I always see just "blue and black" (I tried different ambient light, different screen brightness, different screens, Photoshop manipulations; my brain can always mentally subtract artefacts of shown physical RGB pixels and decode true colors of the captured scene, I can't force my vision not to do these corrections).
But at least this explanation made me understand how somebody else's vision could get "white and gold" perception (even if it's incorrect interpretation of the real world scene captured by that photo).
I can only guess that those who do see it as a white and gold have a brain the is wired to analyze areas smaller than the dress or in low detail.
I did not know there was a contraveesy when first shown the image. She did. I am 100% sure I am seeing the correct image (I am since color dropper verified). She is trying to figure it out. Can this be the power of suggestion since the initial person she saw it from said gold/white?
I tried zooming in on parts of the image to show her that it was indeed black/blue. She saw the blue at high zoom but as soon as any color variation to the blue or a little of the black started to show, she said it flipped back to gold/white for her. When zoomed in on the black she cannot see it as black, and I start seeing a gold tiny to it.
She saw the decomposed color swatches and acknowledged them as black/blue.
When looking at pictures in better lighting of the supposed same dress, she sees it as black/blue.
Hypothesies: (1) this is the case of the power of suggestion. Once you are told it is a certain color you cannot unsee it.
(2) this has to do with poor quality of the image. Is the image on the cusp of some uncanny valley where most people's brains try to fill in the missing information? I say most because apparently around 70% of people see it as gold/white (Sploid poll).
(3) Maybe this has to do with some type of screen refresh rate? Would have been a lot more likely with CRT screens, but don't know if there is some tech on LCD's that can have this effect.
Someone please explain this. I am losing sleep here.
The dress photo is deceptive because of the exposure, levels, and cropping. When some people look at it, they see a lot of light behind it, and subconsciously assume that the dress is probably in shadow. A white-gold dress in shadow would look the way the image does, so their brain says the dress is white and gold.
When others look at the dress, they instead see a dress that is illuminated by light probably behind the photographer, or maybe an over-exposure in some other way. Either way the dress is washed-out, and a blue-black dress would look that way if it were washed out. So their brain says the dress is blue and black.
In reality the dress is blue-black, but the photograph is essentially an optical illusion. Within the context of the photograph only, both ways are valid. You can even switch the way you see it if you can get your brain to "reset" the assumptions it's making about the image. For those of you seeing white-gold, try looking at an upside-down version of the image. [3]
Here is an image that might do a better job at demonstrating what I'm trying to convey. [4]
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/290/blue_and_yellowtinted_choices/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
[3] http://s4.photobucket.com/user/ometauru/media/YNOPKWp_zpstcv...
These are very different questions. Painters know this distinction, at least implicitly, since a big part of painting is producing illusions with the clever application of color. The checkershadow illusion is a similar demonstration of the distinction between medium and message (or sense and reference, to borrow Fregean language).
Phenomena like this reveal that color isn't something known purely by sense perception and that some reasoning is required to conclude what the color is. (A superficial analogy may be made with the theory-ladenness of observation perhaps, though that is a different phenomenon). I wouldn't be surprised if there is a relation between the differences in colors perceived and the ability to reason contextually. Indeed, autism and Asperger's have been characterized as entailing "context blindness".
It looks like a blue tinted picture of a white dress. I see the blue, but it looks like a white dress.
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2xbfxp/what_colo...
The largest group of people commenting seem to be able to see both 'versions' of the dress just by looking at it, looking away and seeing it again.
There are also very many who see only the gold version of the dress and have a lot of trouble seeing the blue version.
Finally, there are very few who can't seem to see the gold version at all.
(This is in no way scientific, there is very likely a very large bias present in the commenters.)
My guess, some people are either color blind, dimming their screens trying to see it, or they are seeing a different image...
This is the dress itself: http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2015-02/26/22/enhanced/webdr...
Which is exactly the colours it looked like in the original image, to me, and to I suspect everyone else who can't make it look anything other than black and blue.
The problem seems to be people changing the white balancing.
I wrote a quick write up, but my computer never identifies a black and blue dress. Even the one you linked would be indigo (not that it maters that much).
The lesson here is that while there is an objective reality, our minds do A LOT of post-processing on our sensory input without our knowledge, so we don't have unfettered access to it.
How does anyone see that as white and gold?
Must be the only time I'm aware of that being an advantage. So everyone - stop wondering, -it is blue and black and you are looking it wrong :-P
I can see how someone might think the black could be gold, due to the shimmer in some places (although it still mostly looks blackish). I don't see how anyone can see the rest of the dress as white though. It looks like dyed blue fabric...taken with a horrible camera/exposure.
But there's no way to get "black."
* First focus on the the upper part of dress where there is a bright light with eyes wide open. -> ( white/golden )
* Now focus on the lower part (looking down squintng a little ) -> (blue/black)
:D
I can't see it as white/gold at all. Today's XKCD does a good job of showing me how it could appear that way to others though. http://xkcd.com/1492/
The interesting/funny thing is we just started watching Brain Games on Netflix and the first episode was about colors and perception. They very visibly demonstrate this with the color gray. https://www.youtube.com/v/BnPbT3wgfG8
I wonder if the reason this dress color thing has been spreading around so fast is because of the different devices everyone is using to view it. When I first saw the dress on my Macbook Pro screen (non-retina) the dress looked white and gold. Then I checked on my iPhone 6 in the dark later on and it looked blue and black.
I've been seeing articles about how the reason people are seeing different colors is because of different types of eyes, psychology, etc...maybe the answer is much simpler.
The first time I passed by my friend's post with the photo on my facebook feed, it was white and gold. I ignored it and scrolled on. A few minutes later while scrolling back up to the top, that same exact picture (same post) was blue and black.
I've seen it switch a couple times since on my phone (nexus 4). Although on my desktop it's always white and gold.
Even my desktop and laptop screens have their own opinion. I think the image is mainly a good test for calibrating your screen. http://imgur.com/Agxo20K
I see it blue-black, inverted it looks like blue lace with dark fabric. If I saw this first I would think that the original lace would look yellow and the fabric light.
and then my girlfriend came, and we were talking about the dress (ATM she hadn't ever seen it) and to my surprise she starts seen it as white/glod!!! -- and I was (puzzled) seeing it clearly blue/black
after some 2 o 3 minutes, she started seeing it was starting to _change_ .. and then boom! all she sees is a black/blue dress, and also she notes that the image has background, before she was only seeing the dress and backlight .. before she could not recognize anything in the background as there was too much lightning
is this something the brain could "fix" and after that period, you cannot unsee?
Everyone (including the Wired people in the submitted article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117137) seems to be trying to white-balance the image as if it has only a single light source. "He saw blue in the highlights, telling him that the white he was seeing was blue, and the gold was black. And when Harris reversed the process, balancing to the darkest pixel in the image, the dress popped blue and black. “It became clear that the appropriate point in the image to balance from is the black point,” Harris says."
I don't understand why. The blown out highlights of the background (which seems to be people carrying bags outside a window?) seem to make it clear that whatever's hitting the dress is a different light than what's filling in the background.
The hardest question I feel remains, then, is: if the dress is white, why is the foreground light blue-cast? Generally indoor lighting is yellow than outdoors... possibly a flash? The quality of the image is so poor that it appears that there was still not nearly enough light hitting the front of the dress, but on the other hand I don't spot anything on the front of the dress that I'd say was definitely a flash highlight... my best theory is that it's a 100% crop of a bigger image and the flash isn't sufficient because the photographer was actually quite a bit further away (and had a poor camera/cameraphone).
But that light temperature question is a problem the other way too: if it's a blue dress under warm indoor lighting (hence the yellow/gold-ish tinge to the 'black' parts), what's up with the particular shade of blue the light part of the dress is rendering as? That doesn’t look like blue in warm light to me. That's a really weird shade for blue to render as, I see that shade far more often when looking at white objects in cool light.
People also tracked down (don't have original source, just people reposting on Facebook) this site which sells a very-similar-if-not-exactly-the-same dress in both a blue and white variant (hard to be sure of the details with the poor quality of the original pic)! But neither secondary color (seems to be untinted black in both cases): http://www.romanoriginals.co.uk/invt/70931?colour=Ivory - and in none of the “corrected” blue images I’ve seen does it look like that shade of blue, without clearly crushed shadow detail indicating underexposure. But if that is exactly the same dress, than I honestly can’t say, since there are weird things about both color rendering options! (Why wouldn't the dark lace be blue-cast too? Alternately, why is the blue less gold-cast than the lace if the dress is really blue?)
EDIT: another option for how the exposure got so weird in a blue-dress scenario: there could be another item in the hypothetical uncropped original photo that is not overexposed that explains how both the dress and the background are overexposed? If just the dress was the original subject of this photo I'm surprised by how poorly the camera picked the exposure/white-balance.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roman-Womens-Detail-Bodycon-Dress/dp...
EDIT: I'm thinking that the right move might be adding #392c00 (rather than subtracting!).. And I've updated the final image with that instead of the one from before.