Here’s a pretty good Slate article on this dress, and how important this image became:
https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/heres-why-people-saw-the-dress-differently.html
When I look at the image attached to this post, I can’t see anything but white and gold, as I always have. This, in spite of now knowing it’s black and blue.
Blue and gold to me
I’ve never seen even a hint of gold in this image. It’s always been blue and black to me
On my phone the background of Lemmy (not the photo) is black. And what is clearly gold in the photos doesn’t look anything like black.
I know the dress is blue and black and that’s what pisses me off. I can’t even see blue and black if I try.
I don’t get it. It’s clearly white and gold. How can anyone see black and blue?
I recall seeing pictures of the dress in other light that make it obvious, and when you compare them next to each other i can see what’s going on, but yeah by default my eyes 100% see white/gold here.
you fools the dress is clearly grey :3
I stuck my foot in my mouth about this dress. It was about a year later, and I didn’t realize it had been proven to be black and blue, and I said something snarky when someone I liked said it was black and blue. I was so sure it was gold and white, I made an ass of myself.
Friggin hate that dress.
Just asked my kids (Not around for the first time). One says blue and black/gray and the other said purple and green/gray. I’ve never known anyone who actually saw it as white and gold. Only heard that people do.
It’s so fucking white and gold I think there’s something wrong with you and your children
Look at the background. The lighting is a warm yellow. This shifts blue to white and black to gold.
It’s white and gold to me
I do
I do, too
It’s white/gold if you recognize that it’s lit from behind. So the dress appearing darker is due to there being much less light on it than the stuff behind it.
I can’t see it as blue/black because I can’t make my brain ignore the fact that it’s backlit. But if your brain never recognizes that, then I suppose it would look blue.
They established that its blue and black. I see white and gold but the actual colour was never the debate.
Does it help that you can see the shadows of the sleeves on the body of the dress? There has to be light in front and above for that to happen.
whats next? are you gonna post who remembers yanny/laurel? bitch be fr
Ten years? I remember clearly that I argued about this on my friends mailing list
older than 10 years, more like 12 or 13. I remember arguing about this damn dress at the ad agency I was working at in 2012.
It appears white/gold to me on it’s own, I’ve never been able to see anything different.
Grabbing this specific image and sampling the colours though; they appear more of a grey/brown colour. I can sorta maybe understand blue, but definitely not black.
This is just using Polish photo editor on android:
It’s funny how people will keep barking about it even when you slap them in the face with color picker which is mathematical display of the color. There is no “how brain is seeing things”. It’s literally WHAT THE COLOR IS. To call white with faint blue tint “blue” and what is clearly a “gold” shade can’t possibly be black. If photo was heavily manipulated through photo editing or lighting, that doesn’t prove anything at all. Or the question was stupid. No one was really asking “what color is the dress”, they were asking what colors are on the photo. And photo has no relation to the real dress because of light conditions manipulation or even photo editing.
This is exactly the thing.
Whatever the dress may be in reality, the photo of it that was circulated was either exposed or twiddled with such that the pixels it’s made of are indeed slightly bluish grey trending towards white (i.e. above 50% grey) and tanish browny gold.
That is absolutely not up for debate. Those are the color values of those pixels, end of discussion.
Edit to add: This entire debacle is a fascinating case of people either failing to or refusing to separate the concept of a physical object versus its very inaccurate representation. The photograph of the object is not the object: ce n’est pas une robe.
The people going around in this thread and elsewhere putting people down and calling them “stupid” or whatever else only because they know that the physical dress itself is black and blue based on external information are studiously ignoring the fact that this is not what the photograph of it shows. That’s because the photograph is extremely cooked and is not an accurate depiction. The debate only exists at all if one party or the other does not have the complete set of information, and at this point in history now that this stupid meme has been driven into the ground quite thoroughly I should hope that all of us do.
It’s true that our brains can and will interpret false color data based on either context or surrounding contrast, and it’s possible that somebody deliberately messed with the original image to amplify this effect in the first place. But the fact remains that arguing about what the dress is versus how it’s been inaccurately depicted is stupid, and anyone still trying that at this late stage is probably doing so in bad faith.
Earlier today I was sat in a dark room reading this thread, I looked at the picture above and it clearly had blue tones with warm dark grey. The dress was obviously blue/black.
I’m sitting outside in the light now, looking at the same picture on the same phone in the same app and now it’s white and gold/brown.
Without going on my pc and colour picking it myself I can’t tell what colour the picture really is since my eyes seem all to happy to lie to me about it.
They’re not stupid, their visual cortex just lacks the ability to calibrate to context. You can see in the picture that the scene is very brightly lit. If your visual cortex is in working order, you’ll adjust your perception of the colours. The picture reveals that some people struggle to do that.
The “white” pixels are literally blue. The “black” ones can be considered gold due to the lighting.
You missed the whole point. If I take a white dress and then shine a blue lamp on it, then take a photo.The pixels will be 100% blue, but would that mean the dress itself is blue?
But you can clearly see that the lighting is bright yellow-white, not blue…
The yellow background could be lit by another window or a different light source, so one could argue we don’t have a good reference to tell. But the point is that the “picture of a thing” is not “the thing” itself, and there is always a possibility that they are different.
That’s… literally not what this phenominon is about, either. Talk about missing the point.
It’s exactly the point. White fabric will appear blue in blue light, which is why some people see this white dress and think it’s blue.
That is literally what the argument is caused by, adaptive perception to lighting conditions.
Next up: the dress worn by the woman on the right.
Why not an American photo editor?
A) I’m not American
And
B) America can go fuck itself until it sorts out it’s Nazi problem. I still think Canada should enact a full trade embargo and take our business elsewhere.
I mean… it was a dumb joke on Polish and Polish being homographs, but okay.
Woops
I missed that; bit of a sensitive topic atm…
Why are people downvoting someone for admitting they made a mistake? It takes some courage to do that.
Probably because they qualified it by making an excuse for themself instead of just owning the error without ‘strings attached’.
Can’t believe it’s been 10 years. I’m getting old, and I’m not even 40.
I can sort of change it. Probably just my TN monitor though.
Never understood this one, or believed anyone who said they saw black/blue. You can zoom in and colour pick, the colours are measurable and objectively gold and blue-white.
I see white/gold too, and this always fascinated me because I’m wrong. The real dress is black/blue. It’s very hard for me to perceive that way, partly due to the bad quality picture, and particularly the background lighting.
The gold is black and the white is a dark blue irl, but in the bad coloring/lighting of the picture, the deep blue is quite washed out. Know that the colors are very washed out, know that the “gold” is black. Focus on the lower left where the colors are closest to true and block out the rest, especially the bright parts. The thick black stripe in the middle can also be a good spot to start to see it.
When I first saw the pic it was clearly blue/black. I laughed out loud when my wife asked me about the white/gold dress. I showed her my phone, and she agreed she could kinda see the blue black. She showed me hers, and I could kinda make out the white gold.
The device you view it on matters, and the lighting around you. For a while I could switch between them with concentration.
This pic is obviously white/gold.
Were taking about the pixels on the screen, not the real dress though, the colors on screen are what you see and theyre gold and blue-white
I’m the exact opposite. When somebody first showed me the picture, I thought “is this some kind of trick question? It’s obviously black and blue”. And still to this day, after many arguments with (friends and family) as what I can only perceive as stubborn defensiveness, I can still only ever perceive it as black and blue.
I literally cannot override my color perception to trick myself into seeing white and gold and it feels like a mistake a lot of people made (to see white and gold) and then just stuck with and argued for (“it’s an optical illusion!” or “look at the pixels!”).
I literally cannot override my color perception to trick myself […]
If biology had intent, I’d think this is intentional. You’re not supposed to be able to do that.
Once your brain decides on a context, that becomes the (percieved) truth, and it’ll take a lot of new information to change your mind because your brain will invent reasons why what you’re seeing is correct. Your brain makes up a story, that story seems to make sense, and so new perceptions not only need to make sense but also disprove the story it has.
Take, for instance, this silhouette. It has no lines to indicate depth, but I bet you’ll settle on a mental 3D model—you’ll be able to see where the hips end, which leg is doing what—and it’ll be really hard to switch perception from spinning one direction to spinning the other.
Funny, I see black and blue, of course the “black” part looks like gold but I think it’s because of the lighting and the actual color is dark gray
Yeah, and then people started posting comparison shots of what both groups of people see, side by side. One dress clearly being blue/black, and the other being clearly white/gold.
I just remember thinking to myself how people can look at that and still believe in nonsense. If there really was something going on with the colors, light wavelength, etc. we’d just be looking at a side-by-side image of two identical dresses, like looking at a stereoscopic image.
This isn’t the picture they used at the time either, why are we cropping it now?
You never understood it because you are wrong. If you actually *color pick you will see that it is blue and black. Not only are you eyes/brain incorrect, but the original dress is actually blue and black.
I did that in photoshop and it confirned what my eyes saw
This dress is black and blue. I am laughing hysterically that any of you think it’s not. Is your eyesight bad in other ways? Honestly asking because mine is really good.
I regularly colour-match clothes as part of my retouching work. My eyes are fine otherwise I wouldn’t be trusted with critical color work.
Idk there is no universe in which this is anything but blue and black.
How does it feel to be objectively wrong?
It was always black and blue, but I’ve always found it fun to switch back and forth between which color combination it was. It was also a fun phenomena, but I don’t like that it was ten years+ ago now. Time moves a bit too fast.