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Science

Is That Dress White and Gold Or Blue and Black? 420

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.
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Is That Dress White and Gold Or Blue and Black?

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  • by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @09:34AM (#49153155) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @09:42AM (#49153189)
      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. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.
      • by jpapon ( 1877296 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:07AM (#49153293) Journal
        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.
        • by beuges ( 613130 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:30AM (#49153401)

          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: (Score:2, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward
            I saw it as hot pink and emerald green.

            Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling that to my psychiatrist, and that's why I'm typing this from a padded cell.
          • by Fnord666 ( 889225 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @11:17AM (#49153595) Journal

            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 [gizmodo.com] is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

            • by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @01:06PM (#49154173)

              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 [gizmodo.com] 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.

            • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:00PM (#49154499)

              Here [gizmodo.com] 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... [gotraffic.net]

        • by Yomers ( 863527 )

          Because what we perceive as the color of some surface is really a reflection of ambient light from that surface. So color of the surface would change depending on color of the light that it is reflecting. But our brain has auto white balance image preprocessing filter that fixes surface color for us based on light color , which is computed partially using our knowledge on what color things should normally have. In this picture dress could be white if it is not in a lighten by yellow colored light behind it,

        • Looks absolutely, positively white/pale gold to me. And that was on three screens with a photographer's eye.

          • by grnbrg ( 140964 ) <<slashdot> <at> <grnbrg.org>> on Saturday February 28, 2015 @11:35AM (#49153671)

            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.

            • by rastos1 ( 601318 )

              Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours.

              Excuse me. Is GIMP good enough for that functionality?

              --
              On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle

            • This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow.

              On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch i
        • I am fairly convinced that those that claim the dress to be "distinctly blue" are just trolling the rest and extracting some weird sort of pleasure from it. The interesting aspect of this story is that there are sooo many people willing to troll others.

          • by The Rizz ( 1319 )

            I can only see it as blue, period. Not trolling - I really cannot see this as white in any circumstances, even the XKCD "color balanced" bit I still see it as blue (albeit a much lighter blue on the left).

            Maybe this has more to do with some effect similar to color-blindness? There are more types of color-blindness than just the standard red-green, and they have different effects on how colors are seen (and some kinds of color blindness can actually make you see other colors better). Maybe this dress has hig

            • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @02:13PM (#49154547) Journal

              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... [wikipedia.org]

              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.

      • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:17AM (#49153329)

        >"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.

        • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @04:45PM (#49155241)
          I've been doing white balancing and level adjustments on my photos for over 20 years now. The dress as shown in the photo is white/gold (actually more of a light-blue/gold). You can confirm this with eyedropper measurements in Photoshop.

          However, if you look at the sliver of background which appears to the right, you can tell the photo is badly overexposed. If your eye spotted this and your brain compensated for it by interpreting the pic as what might see if you stepped out into bright sunlight after being in a darkened room, the dress will appear blue/black.
      • No parent is right, it depends on which display. Only one LCD technology has the ability to screw up colours with viewing angles so spectacularly. On any IPS or PVA display the viewing angles won't mess up the colours. My girlfriend said blue and black from her laptop which has a TN display, then changed her mind when she saw it on the desktop with an IPS display.

      • Doesn't happen to me. It's always blue-purple and a muddy black. Even directly in front of a 26" screen centered at eye level. And even after blocking off the obviously over-exposed background. That's what you get when to take a picture with a crap camera in lousy lighting - something ambiguous.
        • by jrumney ( 197329 )
          You actually need the overexposed background there to fool your brain into thinking the dress is underexposed to see the blue as white, and the black as gold.
    • When I see stuff like that, my brain corrects the image for me.

      Are people who are seeing this dress as weird colors just defective?

      (I'm defective in other ways, like a lack of modesty, and some respiratory issues, let's not get all twisted here)

      • by jrumney ( 197329 )
        It depends
        1. on the angle you are looking at the screen (on a phone, from the side, or a laptop tilting your screen back further, it definitely looks black and blue, straight on, see the other factors below).
        2. whether you see the top of it first and scroll down to the rest of the image, or you see the bottom first and scroll up (I think because the top neck area is definitely gold, but the colors of the dress in the photo definitely have a blue tinge to them)
        3. whether you perceive the light source behind as a
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white and gold, or at least grey and gold. 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. That doesn't make the dress any particular color. It makes the picture a particular color. The "white"/"black" part is banging right around 50%, which is clearly neither white nor black.

          The camera diddled the image, maybe it was diddled even more before we actually saw it.

          • by jpapon ( 1877296 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:14AM (#49153323) Journal

            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.

            • by itzly ( 3699663 )

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

              Agreed, but white objects in the shade under a blue sky are usually blue. Look at the white snow under the trees, for instance. http://khongthe.com/wallpapers... [khongthe.com]

              • by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @01:09PM (#49154193)

                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 [wikipedia.org], but for everything you see).

            • by dAzED1 ( 33635 )
              given that a color sensor on a digital camera is only sensing RGB (sometimes 1 or 2 more...) and that most monitors are only doing the same....just what would you expect white or grey to be, in the end? How would it be "captured" as an image if not by a sensor which can only detect R, G, or B?
          • The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white [...] or at least grey [...]

            What's your definition of "IS" here? Because the only objective measure I can think of is to look at the RGB values, and pretty much every pixel in the "blue" area has a B value about 20%-30% higher than the R or G value. That, to me, makes it about as objectively blue as it's possible to be.

            • pretty much every pixel in the "blue" area has a B value about 20%-30% higher than the R or G value. That, to me, makes it about as objectively blue as it's possible to be.

              Are you kidding? It's possible to be balanced far more towards blue. But also, gold is not a color. I learned back in my Amiga-using, pixel-editing days that there's a lot of blue in most metallics. I don't know if that's an artifact of what happens to light when it bounces off of them, or what, sorry. Not a physicist. But I know that if you're trying to make something look metallic, you're going to be adding some blue to it.

              • Are you kidding?

                No, I'm not kidding, just trying to be objective about it.

                It's possible to be balanced far more towards blue.

                It's also possible to be get quite a bit closer to grey, so I think to claim that the dress "actually IS white/grey" is pushing it a bit. Compare the disputed "blue/white" parts of the image to an actual grey of the same intensity side-by-side and I don't there's any way someone with normal eyesight could fail to see the difference.

                But also, gold is not a color.

                I don't remember saying it was...

              • Yes, the photo was washed out and so looked different than the physical dress. Agreed.

                Gold, however, is a color. Just like seafoam green contains blue, so does gold - at least, once you introduce lighting changes. That's how you shade a color, add or subtract amounts of each color (gold is FFD700, defined by HTML standards). It's just one of those many thousands of colors that aren't anywhere near primary or secondary. Brick red, tangerine and slate blue are all like that yet are still considered col
          • by caseih ( 160668 )

            It's actually gold/black, white/blue. The real dress is dark black in the areas that people, including me, see as gold (and the rgb values are in fact gold), and the areas that people see as white (rgb values are highly saturated blue) are in fact dark blue.

            Agreed that the picture is rubbish.

          • by jrumney ( 197329 )
            The black is the bit that looks "gold". The "white" part is actually blue. Once I realised that the oversaturated light source behind was a reflection of the flash in a mirror (you can see more evidence of flash reflection on the dress itself), and not the sun shining through a window, my brain started processing the image totally differently, and I can no longer see it as white and gold unless I scroll the image so I can only see the top 20%.
    • by itzly ( 3699663 )

      That doesn't explain why two people looking at the same photo swear they see totally different colors.

      • Well, the best explanation is that our brain does very, very hefty colour correction on its own. The reason is probably so we can ignore the irrelevant information, i.e. the light colour and any sensitivity lag between the different cones and identify objects.

        If you've ever tried to do colour computer vision you will be *astonished* at how good we are at it.

        Anyway, my guess is that the reason for this one appearing as two different things is it's very close to some threshold. It's possible to interpret it a

    • It's not just that. It flipped for me. I saw it Friday morning abd, saved the pic to my PC so I could open it up and use a color picker to see it was actually blue when it looked white/gold to me. Later that day, I was going to show it to a co-worker so I opened it up again. But now it was blue/black. It'd flipped twice more for me since then.

      Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.
      • I'd also heard, that much like the rotating ballerina silhouette where you can change your perception of the direction of rotation, it is possible to change your perception of the colours in that photo. I couldn't do it though, stays white and gold.

      • by jrumney ( 197329 )

        Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.

        Which makes me curious - which pair of colours are the two dresses in the xkcd comic to you?

    • by dywolf ( 2673597 )

      i suspect a fair bit is related to the color temp setting of their monitors as well.

    • by Jawnn ( 445279 )
      No, you have an utterly mindless collection of noise, from a crowd of people who don't understand the rather simple science involved here. Is it any wonder that we have so many climate change deniers or anti-vaxers in the world?
    • It's definitely that. I first saw it on the news in a hotel lobby and it was clearly blue and black there. Now, viewing the original stills on my monitor it is blue-tinged white (bad white-balance) and gold. I can get it to shift toward darker blue and gold by changing my viewing angle to the LCD.

  • The GF is regularly checking out the Dutch version of Ebay (Marktplaats) for clothing and these kind of problems are usually caused by poor quality phone camera's.
  • http://xkcd.com/1492/ [xkcd.com]

    It is blue and black, but if you up the lighting, and/or display it against a white background the black lace part looks golden.

    Some programmes on TV over here (including the excellent Last Leg - see it on C4 player) had it on the show, it really is blue and black.

  • by swb ( 14022 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @09:44AM (#49153203)

    I'd swear I saw completely different images of these dresses posted, at extremes of the color controversy and neither was at all ambigous as to what color it was.

    I wonder what the likelihood is that two or more images were served to clients, either at random or by some algorithm, to further the controversy? I can see one single ambiguous image that could go either way, but most of the examples I saw looked to be tweaked for maximum color association.

    If you served tweaked images to clients so that "everyone" saw a different image, including people who saw different images at different times muddying their memory of what they saw over time, you could really amplify the controversy since people would actually be seeing a different image.

    • Of course you could, but what's more likely - some elaborate scheme to create a viral controversy that's tied to no obvious material benefit, or a picture that just happened to be taken with a shitty cellphone that gets interpreted differently by different viewers? What's more, lots of people looking at exactly the same image, at the same time, on the same device (for instance, my wife and I) came to opposite conclusions.

      The summary and linked xkcd comic do a completely accurate job explaining the phenomena

  • by ganv ( 881057 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @09:44AM (#49153205)
    This reminds me of the great entries from the competitaion to explain 'What is Color':

    https://vimeo.com/87968614 [vimeo.com] http://www.centerforcommunicat... [centerforc...cience.org]

    By the way, I see white/lavender and brown. It would be very interesting to know what lighting/image manipulation was done to get those colors out of a dark blue and black dress.

    • Load it in the gimp, increase the brightness (a lot) and the contrast (again, a lot). Without that, the color picker says blue and brown/grey. What color is the dress? Who knows. What color is the dress as shown in the picture? Blue/brown/grey.

      That being said, if you look at the one place in the picture that doesn't appear to suffer as much from color imbalance / over-exposure (the item of clothing hanging on the back of the chair, on the left side at about waist height), It's a cow pattern print.

  • Perception (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @09:47AM (#49153215) Journal

    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.

    • by qubezz ( 520511 )
      I think that understanding photography and exposure is the key to recognizing the color in the picture - if you are familiar with photography, you can see that the background is light and almost blown out, and can use that as a reference for how the entire photo was lit when it was taken. However, if your brain doesn't process the context of the photo, and you evaluate it based on the blue background of a web site or a dark room around you, maybe you have the optical illusion that it is white. I can not uns
      • by itzly ( 3699663 )

        However, if your brain doesn't process the context of the photo

        I did notice the overexposed background, and I interpreted as a picture taken of a white/gold dress in the shade against a sunny background with a blue sky.

    • Re:Perception (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:54AM (#49153505) Homepage

      As such it's not the brightness, it's the color temperature [wikipedia.org]. The spectrum of light ranges in color temperature from 1850K at sunrise/sunset to 6500K on an overcast day to 15000K under a clear blue sky. The eyes adjust to this, if you look at someone using a cell phone at night it'll probably seem to have an eerie blue glow as it has daylight color temperature. So with "nightvision" the dress looks blue/black, with "dayvision" it looks white/gold.

      The people trying to read the RGB values to determine the "truth" forget that the color space assumes you have a D65 white point. Basically your LCD screen is trying to show you correct colors for overcast daylight. If you stare at the red sunrise/sunset or the blue sky for a while and then look at the LCD screen, your color perception will be off. Apparently this picture is in just the right sweet spot to confuse a lot of people.

    • Re:Perception (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zoffdino ( 848658 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @11:14AM (#49153577)

      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.

      • That dress is white and gold. the white part has a blue tint but I wouldn't call it blue.

        No, it's not [nytimes.com]. The original picture is overexposed and washes out the colors as shown in the picture I linked which contains a second picture showing the actual colors.

  • There is big difference between the Tom Cornsweet illusion which is also addressed in the XKCD http://xkcd.com/1492 [xkcd.com] Also this explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] While both are well done, they miss an important point. The Cornsweet paradox works for everybody. Universally. The dress paradox not. For most people (75 percent in one poll), the paradox does not work. (I myself find it hard to believe that some see initially a blue dress). But it seems that different brains work differently. This is
    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      I'm convinced that this is just a joke that I've missed. I've tried good displays, crappy displays, various lighting, brightness settings, backgrounds, room lighting, viewing angles and probably something I've forgot. I can not get that dress to look white and gold.

      It reminds me of "The emperors new cloths".

  • it's sky blue and muddy brown.

    See, I went with the definitive and used a CALIBRATED COLOUR PICKER.

  • Why is this particular image such a viral hit? Have people tried creating images which would appear of different colors but failed to split opinion on such a wide scale?

    [Rant]
    First everyone started arguing over their gut-reaction, "it's obviously color X!"

    Then everyone started trying to sound smart by doing some variation of: "Colors are perceived by your brain! Can you imagine that? Your brain. Like, literally!"

    The /. crowd can mostly understand without much fuss that colors are subjective. A mor
    • The real question is: was the girl who posted this image able to capitalize on its viral popularity, like the owner of Grumpy Cat [avclub.com]?
      • I said elsewhere that this is a scam for the following reasons.

        Her Tumbler account (Swiked) shows the initial photo asking what color is the dress. A day or so later she posts a second picture of someone wearing the blue/black version, stating:

        this is the dress as i saw it on the day of the wedding. blue and black. It's just that one photo bUT it's so weird???!??

        Here's the thing, she does not say the second photo is the same dress ON THE DAY of the wedding, only that the photo shows what she saw.

        What most

        • I said elsewhere that this is a scam for the following reasons.

          Except a good chunk of slashdot, absolutewrite and a few other also completely unrelated forums and IRC channels are in on the "scam" and have a bunch of people who have joined the conspiracy to pretend it's blue and black. Or white and gold, in which case I'm in on the scam and hereby declare I got my note from a shady black vehicle with blacked out windows this morning at precisely 5:50am at the dedicated drop point.

          It's not a scam, because it

  • The image is actually a PNG with some lines criss-crossed over a zero alpha-channel, everyone just has different crappy wallpapers.
  • That is an effect from the picture sensors and optical brighteners (which give white a blue/violet tinge from converting UV to visible). However I am completely mystified as to where anybody sees black. The small horizontal stripes?

  • Not seeing where black comes into it. Don't see any black at all.

    I looked at the PBS story version.

  • and then I realized I just don't care.
  • sigh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by s.t.a.l.k.e.r._loner ( 2591761 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:13AM (#49153321)
    This "____-gate" shit needs to stop. Now.
  • by MassEnergySpaceTime ( 957330 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:15AM (#49153325)

    Earlier tonight, I compared the same picture on the same site using 3 different computer monitors side by side and 3 different tablet screens.

    To me, the white/blue part of the dress is sort of a pale light blue on all 6 screens. But they're different shades of pale blue. On one screen, the blue stand outs a little stronger. On another screen, the blue seems more faded towards white.

    For the black/gold/tan part of the dress, on some screens, the tan color seems more faded, making the darker part stronger, and I COULD call it black. I know it's not PURE black, and it's not as black as that cow patch thing in to the left of the dress. But I could call it a shade of black. On other screens, the tan part stands out more, and I would definitely not call that part black. I don't know if I would call it "gold", but I would call it tan/light brownish.

    So I think the screen settings is one variable that contributes to what colors the user thinks they see in the dress picture.

    For the situations where different people are looking at the same screen or printed photograph, my guess is that the variability comes from the color/brightness/etc sensitivity of their eyes. For example, in my own eyes, one of them sees the wall in a brighter shade of white (and possibly slightly red tinted) than the other eye. Perhaps those who aren't as sensitive to blue might see the blue/white part of the dress as a shade of white, and call it white.

    I guess this picture is just one of those freak pictures where the colors are at some borderline that could be interpreted as one shade of color or another.

  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:24AM (#49153357) Homepage

    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?

  • In http://xkcd.com/1492/ [xkcd.com]
    Columbus sailed the ocean gold
  • Blue and orangish brown. That's what I see.

    • Blue and orangish brown. That's what I see.

      That's what I see too.

      Granted, my first off-the-cuff reaction was white and gold, partially because I was expecting white/gold or blue/black due to the choices presented. Expectation has a lot to do with what we perceive. However, when I looked closer for a minute or two my color perception shifted to blue/burnt orange and that's all I see now.

  • by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @10:39AM (#49153437)

    The XKCD plot just makes me see gold and white at different levels of brightness. But I did find this color illusion featuring yellow and blue. The dogs are actually the same color, which you see if you look at them individually through a small aperture
    http://i.imgur.com/sh5NwCK.jpg [imgur.com]

    Make it pretty obvious that at some point your brain switches from wanting to see blue to wanting to see yellow based on the color context. It would appear some of us are slightly different in where transitions like that occur.

  • Is the Dalek on the left red or yellow?

    http://horman.net/avisynth/dal... [horman.net]

  • ...not the colour perception issue IMO but that this has caused such a big storms on the tubes in the first place. I got shown the picture yesterday and could see it could be blue or white and it's difficult to tell which given the poor lighting. I mean we've all more or less got cameras in our pockets or bags all the time these days, how have so many people missed seeing poorly lit, bad quality pics with white balance issues?
  • I checked with photoshop...
  • I originally saw it as white & gold when I saw it on a forum Thursday night, and figured it was being posted by trolls 'cause they were asking people what color it was even when it was obviously white & gold. Friday morning I saw it on the news on TV, and they explained that some people see it as black & blue. I thought that was a bit crazy, but after a few minutes, I was suddenly able to see it as black & blue......and I can switch back & forth between the two color sets if I try hard.
  • Dressgate??!!! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Dressgate? Seriously? Just kill me already.

  • Absolute stupidity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Khyber ( 864651 )

    Shitty potatophone camera fucks up picture, the internet loses its fucking mind over colors.

  • You actually expect us to answer that question without a Pantone chart?
  • I blogged about it here (with a bonus explanation for how religion works) [shoutingattheclouds.com], but in essence the question as asked presents you with two incorrect answers (each possible answer has one colour correct, one incorrect), so you pick one of them and then argue with everyone else that you are right.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by XB-70 ( 812342 ) on Saturday February 28, 2015 @12:34PM (#49153965)
    The actual colour of the dress is "No, That Dress Does NOT Make You Look Fat."

BLISS is ignorance.

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