To me, on a very bright, sunny day, it looks as though everything is slightly tinged blue. It’s fairly subtle, it’s only when looking at an object that’s supposed to be white that the difference is clear.
When I’ve mentioned it to other people, they’ve looked at me like I was nuts and/or my eyes are fubar.
But it stands to reason, given that anything reflective will be reflecting a bright blue sky (well, depending on the colour of the object). Or does it?
You are correct - it’s called color temperature. On very bright days it is blue and goes down to red during sunset - or candlelight.
The eye still sees white as white (more or less). It automatically adjusts. Cameras (without auto white balance) do not adjust - which is why tungsten lighting looks off. It is capturing the results of the lighting accurately, but you are no longer exposed to the light source - so it looks wrong.
There’s no such thing as an objective “white”; what we perceive as white can be a wildly varying mix of colors.
The light on a bright, sunny day is indeed bluish compared to most other sources, such as incandescent bulbs, candles, etc. (which are reddish). The blue sky is an influence, but even just direct sunlight is blue.
You may have noticed that you can buy “daylight” spectrum bulbs (particularly in CFL or LED form); these aren’t popular for general indoor lighting because they look very blue, given our usual expectation for indoor lighting to be more reddish.
It’s a little odd that you actually perceive sunlight as blue; your brain should adjust its internal white point fairly quickly (most people, after wearing colored sunglasses for a while, don’t notice the color shift). But maybe you’ve somehow trained yourself to perceive the difference.
Probably it does. It’s an observation I likely make on first going outside, or after having my eyes closed for a while.
Everything returning to “normal” colour is probably less noticeable. But I’ll be looking out for this effect the next time I go out 
The hot thing has to change temperature for that to occur. Does the sun actually change temperature through the day ? No.
The midday sunlight on a clear day is YELLOW.
A psychological effect is that your brain may adjust and set the brightest thing you see to be white..So if there is a bright thing in the sunlight, and its actually yellowish, then your brain treats this colour as white . So then it decided that a white thing is blue..
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Also, if the strong sunlight is reflecting off something blue, then the blue thing may be glowing blue , diffusing blue all around.. and a white thing illuminated with blue light appears blue. This occurs more often when there is a strong sun. (because on a dull day the glow can be too low to notice,and your brain corrects for the colour changes that occur due to gloomy conditions..)
There you go, then. You’re just more perceptive than most.
I wonder, though–are humans evolved to automatically associate indoor/nighttime lighting with a redder white point? We’ve controlled fire for the better part of a million years, and for almost all that time it’s been (in one way or another) the sole source of artificial light. There might have been an evolutionary advantage to better color perception under incandescent light (say, gathering food at night via torch).
Some LED street lights were installed here recently and they have a “daylight” white point. The color quality is fantastic, but there’s something just a tad odd about it–in fact, it looks as if there’s a beam of sunlight on the ground. I like the effect, but it’s not something I’m used to.
This is both true, and missing the key point. The light from the sun only is yellow. The portion of light we get from the sky during the day is significant.
The term “colour temperature” is misleading in almost all uses. It is only really meaningful for a black body radiator - which the sun is. But the term is also applied to human perception of light, and is used to create an equivalent “white” that matches our perceived idea of the colour balance of some other notionally white light.
CFL lamps, and other line emission lamps (most white LED sources) are the most egregiously awful use of the metric. Here the human perception of a line emission source is matched to a black body radiator temperature. It only works when a pure white surface is illuminated, and breaks down horridly when the illuminated subject is coloured.
However another time when colour temperature is used is in describing standard illuminants. The standard daylight illuminant - D65 - is roughly equivalent to a 6500K block body. This is way hotter than the sun, and the higher effective temperature takes into account the significant additional light from the blue sky. What is important is that the spectrum of daylight does not have the same energy spectrum as a 6500K body, but it has an energy spectrum that our eye perceives as having the the same colour as a 6500K source. (Technically the white point is that temperature.) The precise D65 illuminant specification (as do all the Dxx illuminants) actually has ripples and notches defined in the response that correspond to precise atmospheric effects and emisison lines, and is defined to be a very close fit to the real spectral energy distribution of daylight.
There are other standard illuminants that represent other times of day or cloud cover. North sky daylight (northern hemisphere bias here) is even bluer than D65, and is D75 - equivalent to a 7500K black body in white point colour.
There are standard illuminants for florescent sources, and it is these that are used to describe CLF and LED lamps. These are F series standards.
IIRC there were filters (back in the days of film) for precisely this; in shadow, out of the sun, on a bright sunny day, or when a cloud goes over the sun - daylight film would give a blue tint on everything, and exactly why you say so - the ambient light from the sky is tinted blue.
As mentioned, our brain compensates for bad colour balance. You can see this with unaltered photos. Using daylight balance, outdoor shadows are blue; tungsten light is orange, sometimes heavily so. Flourescent light is sickly greenish, depending on the bulb type. the old shoplifter’s joks “I wanted to see how this jacket looked in sunlight” is somewhat correct - the flourescent lighting in a store may “look” white, but some items will seem very different hues in different temperature lighting.
Also, as light fades, our colour sense fades. At very low light levels, we see black and white. (rods vs. cones in the retina).
Light from the sun isn’t yellow, unless the sun is pretty low. It’s the very definition of white. We’ve had this discussion before. If sunlight were noticeably yellow, themn clouds and anything else in the landscape that’s white would appear yellow as well. Sunlight is noticeably yellow when the light passes through a lot of atrmosphere, as happens when the sun is rising or setting. But at noontime, for instance, the sun is pretty squarely in that locus of the cIE illumination diagram we unhesitatingly identify as “white”
Atmosphere, of course, scatters out light of shorter wavelengths more than longer wavelengths, mostly (but not entirely) due to Rayleigh scattering (there are other mechanisms present – see books on meteorological optics). For the relatively short path the light travels duiring modst of the day, this doesn’t remove enough light to make the sun appear yellow, but it certainly does make the sky look blue.
The answer to the OP’s question is therefore a bit hazy, because it depends on circumstances. Objects seen by light that co,mes from the sky plus the sun shouldn’t seem bluish any more thamn clouds should appear yellowish. Even when the sun is blocked from your field of view, you’re still getting reflected light from other objects that are getting direct sunlight. But if the sun id significantly blocked by clouds, or has set, then you’re really getting the bulk of your illumination from the sky, which is definitely buer than yellow. At Twilight things definitely do get blue.
It doesn’t work the other way, though. When the sun comes in through my bathroom window (which blocks out light from the rest of the sky), my white toilet doesn’t look yellow – it looks white. As long as the sun is highg in the sky, there’s not enough blue scattered out of it to affect its color. But the scattered light from the sky IS weighted toward the blue, and eliminating the sun will make that blueness obvious.
Yes, the sun surface temperature is 5800K. However the apparent colour temperature of the Sun as seen from the ground (having had some blue light scattered into the sky) on Earth is 4800K. This is still a lot hotter than incandescent lights, but is a lot lower than the apparent colour temperature of the full mix of noon daylight - at 6500K. Whether you call 4800K yellow is a different matter. The eye will compensate as usual, and balance the perception. But you can perform the experiment of contrasting just the direct sunlight illuminating a white object with daylight on the same object, and the pure direct sunlight will appear yellowish - but only when you see the two next to one another.
Where things are really starting to get weird is where we have a mix of artificial lighting sources. I observed this when I had tungsten halogen, LED, and CFL lamps all running at the same time. The LED had a distinct magenta tint, the CLF greenish and the halogen orange - all at the same time. It was only observable when they illuminated a white surface and visible where the light overlapped on that surface, but it was quite distinct. Individually each source seems white (ignoring the usual awful issues with line spectra sources on coloured bbjects.)
I googled around some photography sites last night (based on md2000’s comment), and they all said that on a sunny day, in the shade there will be a “cold” colour balance and you’ll need to adjust the white balance accordingly.
Perhaps it’s like this: Say you’re standing in the shade. And the objects around you are also in shadow. Are those objects lit more from reflected light of objects outside of the shade, or the blue sky? I’d guess the latter, but even a 50:50 mix say would result in the objects around you looking bluish.
Now, the objects outside of the shade will be a “normal” colour temperature. But if anything, that will make the objects around you seem more blue, because your brain will not be able to do its white balance trick.