What Color Do you See?

[phantom153]

i see whiteish/pink and gold but that might just be because im color blind or that my eyes are shit.

[Motox]

We asked our ace photo and design team to do a little work with the image in Photoshop, to uncover the actual red-green-blue composition of a few pixels. That, we figured, would answer the question definitively. And it came close.

 

In the image as presented on, say, BuzzFeed, Photoshop tells us that the places some people see as blue do indeed track as blue. But…that probably has more to do with the background than the actual color. “Look at your RGB values. R 93, G 76, B 50. If you just looked at those numbers and tried to predict what color that was, what would you say?” Conway asks.

So…kind of orange-y?

 

“Right,” says Conway. “But you’re doing this very bad trick, which is projecting those patches on a white background. Show that same patch on a neutral black background and I bet it would appear orange.” He ran it through Photoshop, too, and now figures that the dress is actually blue and orange.

 

The point is, your brain tries to interpolate a kind of color context for the image, and then spits out an answer for the color of the dress. Even Neitz, with his weird white-and-gold thing, admits that the dress is probably blue. “I actually printed the picture out,” he says. “Then I cut a little piece out and looked at it, and completely out of context it’s about halfway in between, not this dark blue color. My brain attributes the blue to the illuminant. Other people attribute it to the dress.”

 

Even WIRED’s own photo team—driven briefly into existential spasms of despair by how many of them saw a white-and-gold dress—eventually came around to the contextual, color-constancy explanation. “I initially thought it was white and gold,” says Neil Harris, our senior photo editor. “When I attempted to white-balance the image based on that idea, though, it didn’t make any sense.” 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.

 

 

So when context varies, so will people’s visual perception. “Most people will see the blue on the white background as blue,” Conway says. “But on the black background some might see it as white.” He even speculated, perhaps jokingly, that the white-gold prejudice favors the idea of seeing the dress under strong daylight. “I bet night owls are more likely to see it as blue-black,” Conway says.

 

At least we can all agree on one thing: The people who see the dress as white are utterly, completely wrong.

 

Please stop the autism before it spreads any further.

 

Source

[Vick]

I see hot pink and orange....

 

jk... white and gold

[xDoodles]

I see hot pink and orange....

 

jk... white and gold

 

^ this

[BoM]

I only see blue and a brown/blackish color depending on what section I look at.

 

Sucks for you guys I guess

 

Also in all the pictures from the thing leon posted it still only looks like different shades of blue.

[Zorg]

[Leon]

 

You were so close.. I blame Vick.

[Vick]

 

You were so close.. I blame Vick.

 

GOD DAMNIT.

 

ALSO:

[Ryoku]

[Vivian]

In every picture I see, its varying shades of blue and black. Yall are weird.