Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Science Of 'The Dress': Why We Confuse White & Gold With Blue & Black

blue and black dress science

Another early study showed that the dress phenomenon was not merely an artifact of language, or how people choose to classify colors using words. “I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.” Jay Neitz, a color-vision researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, told Wired. Having more of one or the other will lead you to be likely to see the dress as white or gold, or blue and black. Lacking L or M cones has minimal impact on perceived dress colors while a lack of S cones yields a very different perception suggesting a primary role of the S cone input in perception of the Dress.

blue and black dress science

If that’s true, then the larks should be more likely to interpret an ambiguous image as being lit by the short-wavelength light they’re used to seeing and thus more likely to see the dress as white and gold. Owls should have a tendency to assume long-wavelength, artificial lighting, and would thus see the dress as black and blue. But differences in lighting can warp how people perceive color. And it can seem as if colors change depending on surrounding colors, like in the background of the #TheDress. When Wired’s photo team used Photoshop to determine the actual colors, they discovered that context means everything. When the image was white-balanced, though, there were still hints of blue where there should be white, and black where there should be gold.

Here’s the science behind #TheDress colour illusion

Human beings evolved to see in daylight, but daylight changes the colour of everything we see. Human eyes try to compensate for the chromatic bias of daylight colour. In the image as presented on, say, BuzzFeed, Photoshop tells us that the places some people see as blue do indeed track as blue. But...that probably has more to do with the background than the actual color.

The picture itself was overexposed, washing out the colors of the dress, while the illumination was ill-defined. Parts of the image seemed to imply backlighting whereas others implied yellowish, overhead store lighting. Depending how the viewer interpreted this setup, the apparent colors could shift dramatically, from black and blue (the real-life colors) to white and gold. If you assumed that the dress was in a shadow, your brain would subtract out some blue from your internal image of the dress, to account for a shadow’s blueish tint. The blue and black dress illusion was a phenomenon that occurred in 2015, when people were divided on whether a dress was blue and black or white and gold. The illusion caused a lot of debate and discussion, with people taking sides on what they saw.

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And night 'owls', whose world is illuminated not by the sun, but by long-wavelength artificial light will see black and blue. Put simply, 'larks' - people who rise and go to bed early and spend many of their waking hours in sunlight - are more likely to see the dress as white and gold. 'Shadows are blue, so we mentally subtract the blue light in order to view the image, which then appears in bright colours - gold and white.

While the question has been answered, the image continued to form discussions, with people asking others why they perceived the dress as a certain color. In other words, our brains automatically adjust our color perception depending on the context in which something is viewed. The photo on the left has been color-corrected as if the dress were white. The photo on the right has been color-corrected to blue-black. Here is the original image in the middle, with the version on the left white-balanced as if the dress was white-gold, and the right version white-balanced as if it was blue-black.

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Perhaps there are other factors at play, such as assumptions viewers make about fabric and how different materials might look under different types of lighting. That said, the Internet has provided a few more—albeit less popular—examples of the dress effect. The latest of these, posted on the one-year anniversary of the dress phenomenon, shows an Adidas jacket against a white background. “The jacket” divides viewers anew, this time on the question of whether it is white and blue, or brown and black, or another pair of colors entirely. But it appears white and gold to some people due to a phenomenon called color constancy and the way that our brains interpret colors.

blue and black dress science

Your brain is really smart, and it knows this, so without you having to think about it, it just subtracts these other wavelengths from the 'real' colour of the object you're looking at. Which is where everything is going wrong with that goddamn dress - some of our brains are colour-correcting in different ways. But importantly, the light your eye receives doesn't just contain the wavelengths of light reflecting off the object you're looking at, but also those wavelengths that are lighting up the world.

At right, white-balanced to blue-black.Firstly, the dress is actually a complicated mixture. If you find the RGB values of the gold/black, they come out as a “yellowish/gold/brown” says Bart Anderson from the University of Sydney. Your brain figures out what colour light is bouncing off the object your eyes are looking at by subtracting that colour from the real colour of the object. We asked our ace photo and design team to do a little work with the image in Photoshop, to uncover the actual red-green-blue composition of a few pixels.

From QVC to Warner Bros. to local public libraries and even Red Cross. Businesses that had nothing to do with the dress, or even the clothing industry, had even devoted their time and attention to the phenomenon. From Adobe to Pizza Hut and others, also jumped into the conversation with their own marketing messages. In the first week after being uploaded, the post gathered 10 million tweets mentioning the dress, using hashtags such as #thedress, #whiteandgold, #blackandblue, #blueandblack and #dressgate. But you’re also wired to see the colours one way or the other, according to some explanations of the dress.

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