First off, who on earth starts a description of a dress as “pale winter sky blue and burnt orange” ?
Second, I KNOW that dress is blue and black, so why would I describe it as anything else, regardless of the shitty quality of the photograph?
When I look at any of those pictures, my brain immediately says “What an ugly picture of a nondescript blue and black dress.” Period, full-stop. That dress is blue and black. It just is.
When I actually INSPECT the pictures closely, and look at the colors by themselves, I can tell that the blue in the original image is really a pale unsaturated blue (which in my universe, pale faint blue is still blue) and the black is actually a whole range of godawful muddy colors none of which are actually black. Same for the middle image, but the blue there is a lot more saturated.
None of that changes the fact that when I first see any of those pictures, my brain is telling me that I am SEEING a blue and black dress. Knowing that the “black” parts are not actually black in that image doesn’t change anything. So in that sense, yes, all of those pictures are pictures of a dress that is blue and black, even when the actual color values of the images don’t match up.
I’m not trying to be difficult here - it actually LOOKS blue and black to me in all three images, just different saturation values of blue and black.
The picture is very overexposed, but some people’s brains, including mine, think they’re seeing an underexposed image (i.e. the dress is in a shadow). That’s all there really is to it.
Lasciel’s got it right–the black instantly reads as black, even on the link with 3 side by side pics. I have somewhat of a fine arts background myself. Now, I had really bad insomnia last night, so I’m not going to kill myself trying to explain this too technically, but black has a much narrower gamut of shades in highlights and shadows than gold or brown does. So I guess I could just tell that the “gold” (brown-ishness) is a false color. Likewise, if that dress was truly white, but given a blue appearance either due to lighting conditions or reflections in shadow (think of snow) it would have really wide contrast in its lights and darks. But it doesn’t. You’d probably also expect to see some other shades in there, too, unless there was actually a blue lightbulb.
I’m glad my eyes see what’s actually there. I like looking at paintings and seeing the various colors painters use to show white in various shaded conditions or different ambient lighting.
Cops have problems asking witness things like, “what color was the car?” If it were evening or night, I’d just say whether it was lightish or darkish. It’s hard to get the color right at night.
I see white and gold. Is it confirmed that the other pictures are, in fact, the same dress? If you look at the top right corner of the dress (not the jacket), how can it be anything other than gold? People are seeing black there?
What really impresses me is the vehemence of people’s reported reactions. OTOH it may be that I am, in fact, aware of and accustomed to issues of color mix in both cameras and displays so I know colors wash out and contrasts fool the eye so it’s not a point of honor to “see it right”, and the only “true” color is the one you see in person. FWIW I am one of the people for whom first quick look was that it resembled W/G and it took closer examination to see the B/B. In my case, I also have the experience some have pointed out, that when I tipped my screen away from vertical it now looked more clearly B/B due to the polarizing LCD panel.
Neat nifty trick of photo technology and optic perception, and people should take a chill pill and appreciate it for that.
Yes. As far as I am concerned, everyone is “correct.” This is not some sort of “everybody gets a trophy” thing. Objectively, the colors in the photo itself are something like periwinkle and bronze, as demonstrated several times. The actual dress is blue and black. For people whose brains color corrected the bronze part to be neutral, they saw the real-life colors. For people whose brains color corrected to the light parts of the image (the periwinkle), the colors are gold and white. There is not enough information in the scene, in my opinion, to make a 100% positive judgment one way or another. I can take a picture like this of a gold and white dress and make it look periwinkle and bronze if the dress were somewhat near a store window.
Yeah, I agree that people should chill, but I can understand the vehemence. Most optical illusions, you can recognize that they’re kinda ambiguous even if you’re only seeing it one way. But this is different. The dress was so obviously blue and black to me. There was no ambiguity. It really did feel like people were involved in some big joke when they were saying white and gold.
I actually did learn something from this. Someone posted an explanation on Twitter that had to do with blue light having the shortest wavelengths. I’d always understood it to be the other way around - that blue light had the long wavelengths and red had the shortest wavelengths. But a minute’s worth of Googling and reading showed that I’d had it backwards for the past 50+ years.
But I could swear that in elementary school, we were taught that *red *light had the short wavelengths, while blue was long, and that tied in with a number of other things, like why all the red at sunset, or why you can only see things a few feet away by the light of your clock radio with the red time display, but a similar clock with a blue time display will illuminate the entire room, or why police cars changed their lights from red to blue back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Who knows whether I remember correctly - due to Smapti’s music threads, I’ve been forced to realize that my memories of hearing CCR’s “Proud Mary” on the radio during the summer of 1968 had to be false. So I could be misremembering this as well. But I’d be interested to know if anyone else ‘learned’ in school back in the 1960s that red light had the short wavelengths.
Thanks for the explanation. However, I’m still not sure how you call something that looks like the color “burnt orange” black.
I don’t think anyone is asking what the color of the original dress is, just what color it LOOKS like in the photo, so knowing that the dress is black and blue in real life is irrelevant.
Scroll down to #16, the angry panda (ugh, Buzzfeed you make me sound like a moron!) and put the panda gif at the top of your screen, so that #15 (the dress) is off the top of the screen
Slowly scroll UP to reveal the dress picture (on the right) a little bit at a time, from the bottom up.
Does that look blue & black to you?
I am in the “white and gold at first glance” camp but when I see it from the bottom up I definitely see the blue.
Now, there a lot more contextual clues there that you can probably figure out the real color, since the blanket itself is made of more colors than just white and gold, but if you took the photo in the same conditions where the only reference colors were white and gold and the background colors, it would be difficult to tell whether it’s supposed to be blue or white.
But I don’t care what color it is supposed to be. I am talking about what color it looks like in the photo. In your first blanket photo, the light areas definitely look like some sort of blue shade, and in the second, the same areas are white.
If someone asked me “What color does THIS AREA look like in this picture” and showed me your first blanket picture, and pointing to one of the light areas, I would say “blue” because that’s what it looks like in the picture. Apparently, you would say “white” for some reason.
Yes, and I’ve already said the colors are objectively a periwinkle, not white, and bronze, not black, so neither the “white and gold” or “blue and black” camps are objectively correct. I’ve also explained why some folks would see the first and others the latter. There’s no mystery here, as far as I’m concerned.
No, I would say blue. Not sure how in all my posts you got the idea that I would say white. My very first post says: “It looks like bluish-white and mustard to me” and I agree with the “I see periwinkle and bronze” comment in my very next comment.
