"What colour is this dress" craze

[DaveC426913]

Please don't beat me for bringing some dumb puffed-up internet meme to PF. Seriously, this is embarrassing. But fascinating.

(I'm posting this in biology because I'm certain it is a colour perception issue.)

Maybe you have seen this by now.
http://digg.com/2015/what-color-is-this-dress

I didn't think anything of it and was about to skip past it. But I showed my wife, and I was gobsmacked to find that she and I had exactly opposite views and had very strong feelings about it.

I would not have believed there was anything interesting to this if I hadn't had the very thing happen in my own living room.Great. Now I'm having the same argument at work.

 

[Suraj M]

Maybe the website people are changing it now and then!

 

[DaveC426913]

BTW, here is the rational explanation:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

“What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”

 

[DaveC426913]

Maybe the website people are changing it now and then!

Nope. I am shoulder-to-shoulder with other people looking at the same screen, and they are crying 'blue/black you moron!'

 

[Guco]

I would say gold/light purple... definitely closer to gold/white than blue/black for me. I'm not really sure how people could see black in it.

 

[Suraj M]

I'm not really sure how people could see black in it

Reduse the brightness of you're screen, you should be able to see a tinge of blue/violet/purple in the place of white.

 

[Bystander]

Color wheel illusion, Benham's wheel. Here's a U-tube link ---- don't work for me on my laptop --- might work for some people --- better results are obtained watching the real thing.

 

[phinds]

I see powder blue and dull brown

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

The newest internet social craze is over this photo of a dress. Some people see it blue and black while others see it white and black. What do you think?

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/p480x480/10931018_1614364172141308_3421383782875954059_n.jpg?oh=63037783e24b9dac81944a71b0ced9e0&oe=557A9255&__gda__=1431167230_1d26b3dbf06088df96d4b028664ace2d

 

[zoobyshoe]

I would say one or the other depending on what you mean by the question.

It seems most lenses have some coating that accentuates the blueness of skies. That same device can often give a blue cast to things that are white. That's my assessment of what's happening here: a white dress is being given a bluish cast by a lens effect. Strictly speaking, though, the pixels are blue.

 

[256bits]

A light blue with a hint of golden brown for the whole dress.

BUT

When I move the image to only the bottom part, a slightly darker blue and more, but not total balck.

 

[Evo]

I see powder blue and dull brown

That's what I see at the top, but the lace at the bottom looks black. The link to the "original" dress comes in white/blacvk or dark blue/black. I can clearly see the two different colors on the original website, but the other photo looks a pale blue/brown. It seems the picture is of poor image/lighting/quality, so since different people see varying hues, I can see where they could perceive the color wrong. I know many people that say purple when I say blue.

 

[Evo]

This is the original dress photographed with a proper camera and lighting, you can clearly see the white with black lace and dark blue with black lace. http://www.romanoriginals.co.uk/invt/70931?colour=Blue Click on the blue tab to see the dress in blue.

 

[DrClaude]

It seems most lenses have some coating that accentuates the blueness of skies. That same device can often give a blue cast to things that are white. That's my assessment of what's happening here: a white dress is being given a bluish cast by a lens effect. Strictly speaking, though, the pixels are blue.

I don't understand why one would want to put a filter on the lens. I think it's a question of white balance: incandescent lighting has a yellowish tint, and depending on the settings, the camera will compensate by giving everything a blue tint. I sometimes get the problem with snow, and have to manually set the camera to the correct white balance.

 

[Quantum Defect]

They had this at the coffee shop this morning. All of the men in the room at the time (N=4) saw gold/white and all of the women (N=2) saw black/blue. They had tip jars for voting (smart barristas!) and the vote was pretty evenly split.

 

[DaveC426913]

I would say one or the other depending on what you mean by the question.

It seems most lenses have some coating that accentuates the blueness of skies. That same device can often give a blue cast to things that are white. That's my assessment of what's happening here: a white dress is being given a bluish cast by a lens effect. Strictly speaking, though, the pixels are blue.

I don't understand why one would want to put a filter on the lens. I think it's a question of white balance: incandescent lighting has a yellowish tint, and depending on the settings, the camera will compensate by giving everything a blue tint. I sometimes get the problem with snow, and have to manually set the camera to the correct white balance.

+1 for Claude.
To this photographer, the dress is quite obviously lit by overcast daylight, which is very blue - especially in the eye of a camera.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't understand why one would want to put a filter on the lens.

I don't know the backstory, but Minolta lenses, for example, have a reputation for producing "Minolta colors." I have read this being attributed to a special coating.

Extrapolating from that, rightly or wrongly, I have noticed that just about all digital cameras accentuate the blueness of skies, and I suspect this is deliberately built into the lens (perhaps by means of a coating), simply because consumers like it. It seems to be part of the default "auto" setting. You may be right that it's actually achieved by them setting the white balance a certain way. In any event, white things often seem automatically shifted toward blue, and people are noticing that, such that a certain kind of blue will tell them the original object would be classified as white in real life.

I want to attach an image here. How can I attach an image directly from my computer with this new system?

 

[russ_watters]

I see a badly framed and white balanced photograph.

I really don't get why this went viral -- do people go to the movies and argue over what color the screen is?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

I know many people that say purple when I say blue.

Mixing up blue with purple is a far cry from mixing up blue/purple and white! In my image above, white is the color surrounding both sides of the photo. Clearly the dress is not a white. I am flabbergasted that anyone could think that dress is white in the photo. As for the black, it can conceivably be considered brown. I don't have problem with that. But how can you mix up blue and white!?

 

[kjhskj75]

To some extent it may depend on peoples screen/monitor settings. I see blue/black, but can change to white/gold by altering the colour temperature of my
display.

 

[zoobyshoe]

But how can you mix up blue and white!?

Here's a completely unedited picture I took of a fuel pump sitting on a shop towel. The camera was on "auto" setting:

What color is the towel?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

What color is the towel?

I see your point, but it's a very different example. The dress is fairly solid darkish blue.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I see your point, but it's a very different example. The dress is fairly solid darkish blue.

Well, you can see the blue in the shop towel increases in the shadows. The dress is positioned to be completely in shadow. The highlights in the background are completely blown out to pure white, meaning someone has increased the exposure to get detail out of the dress.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Well, you can see the blue in the shop towel increases in the shadows. The dress is positioned to be completely in shadow. The highlights in the background are completely blown out to pure white, meaning someone has increased the exposure to get detail out of the dress.

The suggestion that it could be white is in your example, it is not in the dress photo. There is no second tone in that dress. It's blue. There are no areas that suggest it also could be white or than normal sheen.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The suggestion that it could be white is in your example, it is not in the dress photo. There is no second tone in that dress. It's blue. There are no areas that suggest it also could be white or than normal sheen.

I could be more tuned into this since I often take pictures of white things, namely pencil drawings, and constantly run up against the frustration of finding the paper looks tinted blue rather than behaving as white should. I often end up converting them to B+W.

 

[BobG]

White and gold.

However, the monitor can definitely make a difference. On my phone, the dress is definitely white and gold. On my computer (on PF), if I scroll so I only see the bottom of the dress, I can see why people would say the dress is blue.

And part of it is just mental. Once I look at just the bottom half of the dress on the computer, the entire dress looks kind of blue on both screens.

And, yes, the actual color seen is definitely blue, but I'd swear the dress must actually be white.

I have no idea how anyone could see black in that dress, though.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Just asked my wife and she said in the image the dress is blue, but to her it was clearly a white dress given the total information in the photo.

 

[zoobyshoe]

And, yes, the actual color seen is definitely blue, but I'd swear the dress must actually be white.

This is what I think everyone sees, and the difference in answers depends on whether you are addressing what you actually see, or what color the dress is in real life.

 

[BobG]

I really don't get why this went viral -- do people go to the movies and argue over what color the screen is?

Well, duh! Don't you?

I thought everybody did that. At least we used to, way back in my day. Before they started showing commercials an hour before the movie started, a white (I'm sure of it, dammit!) screen was all we had to look at.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Here is the color in photoshop