It’s blue and black. And not even a sky blue or whatever - an intense, Crayola blue and black. When I first heard about the white-and-gold, I thought it was a joke - nothing is more not white than that dress. And . . . gold? What? 
Well, I guess this whole “life” thing is just a hallucination after all. Huh.
Likewise. Less magical-illusion dress, more “super shitty photo”.
The writer of this article makes an interesting point. He says he’s been looking at low quality cameraphone pictures for several years and has developed the ability to mentally compensate for the color changes that result. This makes me wonder if the difference between people who see white and gold and blue and black is based on how many previous cameraphone pictures they’ve seen.
Yeah. When I woke up this morning and saw the dress, it was 100% white & gold. After reading the Wired article and listening to the morning news shows talk about it endlessly, it’s became 100% blue & black.
Brains are scary.
The dress looks light blue and gold to me, no matter what I do, even looking at only part of the image, or scrolling it, or looking at it after not looking at it. Calling the dress “white” (as I did when I first saw it makes sense, because white things often look that color when illuminated by indirect sky light. So I wouldn’t ding anyone who called it “white”. It appears to be an extremely light blue, in any case.
I am flabbergasted that anyone would call the other parts black. I can see reasons to call it a number of other colors, but black is not one of them. It’s reflecting too much light to be “black”. Even if you argue that “black” often reflects highlights, the “trim” is mostly “highlight”. And the reflected color, in the Wired color dissection, pretty clearly looks gold.
I’ve seen plenty of those diagrams of how colors can be made to appear different depending upon what background it’s on, but I’ve never seen any example that would make gold appear to be black.
Actually, it’s the other way around. The blue cloth looks less blue because of the lighting. I explained and showed an example in post 50 of what is going on:
The camera, seeing all the blue in the frame, is wanting to white balance it by adding yellow to the frame, assuming the scene should be more neutral.
Second, the dark tones in the camera are throwing the light meter off. Hence the image being made brighter.
That said, objectively, as determined by Photoshop, the “black” parts are definitely a warm toned desaturated color in the yellow-orange spectrum (mustardy would be one way to call it) and the “blue” or “white” parts are a light, desaturated blue. Some people’s brains are compensating for the blue part, making it white, and others are compensating for the mustard part and making it gray or black, I guess.
No matter how hard I try, no matter what tricks I’ve seen in this thread, I just can’t flip the mustard/bronze to look black or, for that matter, even dark gray in my head.
I’ve seen the Adamsom illusion and I kind of understand that, but xkcd’s image is still not doing it for me: the left-hand image’s dress is clearly a lighter colour than the blue in the central bar, as is the ‘gold’ neck and collar a different shade from the central bar. It’s still not demonstrating it for me.
Definitely black and blue for me.
It’s just the people who run our sim fucking with us. A lot of Bryllguxians are having a BIG laugh at how this exploded across the internet.
There is no dress.
I could write the same thing but with Black and Blue.
But: Serious question…
Has anyone here ever seen, say, an animal you didn’t recognize at first so your brain and eyes said “Dog” and then another part of your brain “that’s no dog” and then you felt slightly sick to your stomach and finally everyone got their shit together and said “Oh. That’s the biggest opossum I’ve ever seen.”
That moment of queasiness, is there a word for it?
Has anyone had a friend or whatever looking at the exact same image, on the exact same monitor, at the exact same time and disagreed on the colors?
Clearly gold and white.
Yep, several in my office flatly disagree.
Yes. Pretty common. IT’s being discussed in some professional photographer Facebook group I belong to, and the breakdown there is also about 75-25 (gold/white vs black/blue) with a couple disagreements among photographer couples who are both looking at the image at the same monitor. And my general Facebook feed has comments indicating a couple or a family looking at the photo on the same monitor and seeing different things. And two photographers have been able to get the image to “flip” in their heads. The first time they looked at it, it looked one way. The other time, the other way.
They are all looking at the same monitor, not there own monitors, or their own links? Crowding around one person’s computer?
According to this article today, it’s a blue and black dress - but photographed in poor light.
Saw strong blue and black.
Since the dress is actually blue and black, it would appear a majority of people have terrible vision, which is an interesting fact to know. The background color influencing the adjacent color optical illusion doesn’t work because the majority of the picture is the dress itself.
Maybe LCDs have ruined colors for people. RIP CRTs.
In the cases I reported, yes.
But when I remove the background by making a peephole with my finger, it remains white and gold. Even after I look away for a minute.
The actual colors in the picture are a light blue and a bronze/mustard yellow. The actual item is a deep blue and a dark black. This does not have anything to do with “terrible vision.”