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It's easier to understand the gold part than the white part to me. But I think I assume that the goldish hue comes more from the light, since the further down o
by bjornsing 12y ago
It's easier to understand the gold part than the white part to me. But I think I assume that the goldish hue comes more from the light, since the further down on the dress I look the more black it seems.
Phrased slightly differently: The yellow-brown (gold) color is most visible on the upper torso where the fabric (to me) is likely to reflect a light source specularly. On the lower part of the dress (where I assume) light is more ambiantly reflected I see black.
Looking at your color squares to the right it's quite clear to me what my visual cortex is doing: It's assuming that specular reflection expains the difference in color in the left column. So each color there is a superposition of two: the ambient color of the dress and the specular reflection of the light source. Separating those two gives me black dress and yellowish lighting.
UPDATE After writing the above I think I understand why it seems so weird to me to see white: I parse the light source as yellowish, so a white dress would never look blue in that light. To me seeing a white/gold dress requires contradictory hypothesis: the light source needs to be blue to explain bluish tint on white stripes; but it also needs to be yellowish to explain the "gradient" in gold/black stripes from top to bottom of the dress.
- chao- 12y agoI'm the same as your update. I tend to enjoy these sorts of illusions and normally can see them "both ways" for some specific illusion. Not so on this one. The rest of the image (i.e. beyond the dress) leads me to also perceive the light being yellow-ish, in which case a white dress would certainly not appear blue.
- bjornsing 12y agoHa! I just had a moment where I could perceive it as white/gold: It was a cropped version showing only the belly portion of the dress with no background, displayed in isolation as a thumbnail on a news site. When cropped like that it made perfect sense. :)
- smoe 12y agoI think people correct the blue to white, since for some reason they mentally assume the picture is taken outside illuminated by daylight where shadows can have a bluish tinge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow#Color_of_shadow_on_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow#Color_of_shadow_on_Earth When i turned the picture upside down with the light source in the back now at the bottom, which couldn't be the sun anymore, my perceived color changed from very very light blue to blue instantly. And now I can't unsee it:)
- greggman 12y agoPeople are not correcting blue to white. The image is measurably white and not blue. Some people may be correcting back to blue but regardless of whether or not the original dress is blue there is no deep blue of the original dress in the image being displayed. We can measure the RGB or HSV or whatever of every pixel and see that objectively