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I still only see white/gold even though the actual dress was black/blue
So people looking at this photograph actually can perceive this to be white and gold? thats utterly wild. And hard to believe.
I see it as dark brownish yellow and blue
Ok is this post some sort of trick? I opened up lemmy, saw it white and gold for the first time in my life, then I took a shower, now it is blue and black once more.
I can never see black and blue. I assume all those who claim to see black and blue are bots. fite me
10 YEARS AGO?!
I remember.
everyone’s wrong, gold and baby blue
Oh yeah, the gold and white dress. I remember some people were acting crazy saying it is blue and white.
Literally the entire planet remembers this. Even people who were not born yet.
Because no one has posted the other photos:
And this is a photo of the same dress taken under proper lighting:
Not even the brighter version looks white and gold to me. It’s so obviously blue and black, y’all are insane.
I understand doubting the white but seeing black in that gold was what I could never buy. To me it seemed like light blue-grey with matte gold.
I’m the opposite, the OG photo reads white and gold no matter what edits I see. Even after seeing the dress in proper light the OG is still white and gold.
I’m with you. This viral moment never made sense to me cuz I can never see anything else even with my wildest imagination.
That’s…why it went viral. So many people couldn’t see it the other way, and both sides found it hard to believe that the other side was actually being sincere.
When i first opened the image, it was undeniably white/gold to me, and I could not trick myself into seeing black/blue. After looking at the HQ image above, now I can not see white/gold anymore.
Edit: After writing this comment, it is back to white/gold.
Had the same happen to me
Let’s do this again!
Seriously WTF??? It’s freakin white.and.gold.
It’s almost like color is arbitrary and dependent on the environment. I know it’s such a complex concept for millions of adults./s
What on earth are you talking about.
Only the ‘darker’ picture looks remotely blue and black
Just curious. If you look at the dress at the bottom, and let your peripherals see the dresses up top slowly, then look up to the dresses on top, do you see them in blue/black then? Happened for me, then even when I scrolled up to the other pictures they stayed blue/black for a while.
Does not help me to see it the other way.
Thanks for confirming. My eyes adjusted when I did so and then as I scrolled back up even the on where they used the color pallet had changed to my vision. Next day saw it as white, and did the same thing again. The brain is weird.
Right? To be white and gold the dress would need to be in shadow, but it’s clearly in light.
Same, I see light blue and still black
Zoom in or sample the colours. They’re not blue and black.
No way, really ? I really thought it was always white and gold. This cannot be the same dress, I do not trust my eyes anymore
The second photo is supposed to be the same dress? Looks like an homage, aka knock-off attempt to me. What happened to the shoulders?
I’ll double-check the source of the second photo, but it looks like the original picture is taken from the back and the second is taken from the front.
Add: Yeah, it’s not the EXACT SAME dress worn to the wedding where the original picture came from, but it is the same design by the same maker.
…Also, THIS is the source the second photo came from and today I learned that the dress actually did drive people insane! Holy fuck! 😭
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/man-whose-mother-law-wore-225725928.html
Some people said the dress was black and blue while others argued it was white and gold. The court heard the couple had a “volatile” relationship and Johnston became enraged with his wife at their home during an argument. He then tackled her to the ground and throttled her using both hands. […] He threatend to “finish her off”, struggled with his wife again, brandished a knife, uttered a further threat that “somebody was going to die” and then attempted to self-harm, the court heard. He pleaded guilty at the same court last month to assaulting his wife to her injury and endangering her life. […] They went on to appear on the Ellen DeGeneres Show in the USA, where they were handed $10,000 and a luxury trip to Grenada.
Man behind viral #TheDress photo jailed for attacking wife
Damn. Sentenced to 4½ years.
Doesn’t look like the shoulder material is physically part of the dress… it’s probably a jacket or shaul.
All three of these look blue and black just with different levels of saturation?? I can understand how people can maybe see the gold, but interpreting the blue as white is baffling to me. Bluer than the day sky.
I have always only seen black and blue, even in the light version my brain doesn’t make it gold and white. It’s strange to me why people perceive this as gold.
Edit this video was the only one to make me see it https://youtu.be/YB36n00NHBw
We’ll I watched the other video and I finally saw the blue and black. I’ve always seen white gold but now I don’t. Fucking trippy.
Even with my phone cranked all the way up it still looks blue to me. I’ve never been able to see the white and gold version people claim exists.
Maybe my comment can help
Left: blue and black.
Middle: light blue and black.
Right: dark blue and black.The dress is blue and black. It will never be white or gold. The lighting or saturation doesn’t matter.
Well the pixels themselves are white and gold so…
When that was going around I saw it as black and blue, and my partner at the time saw it as white and gold. When it was revealed that it was actually the former, I made a comment something like “I guess the difference is I see things as they actually are”, which got me a sharp look. :)
I only see white gold
Black and blue. You blind.
I’m still convinced this is the biggest troll. It’s clearly white and gold
I’ve always really liked this explanation image you can find on Wikipedia page for it. Essentially, people who see white and gold are mistaking the lighting to be cold and blue-tinted, rather than warm and yellow-tinted.
The portions inside the boxes are the exact same colors, you can easily check this with a color picker.
What the actual fuck? When this first came around, my eyes saw white and gold, in this post it looks like overexposed brown and blue, and looking at this graphic is fucking with my head! Brains are wee photo editors, aren’t they?
Ah, so white and gold folks are, indeed, mistaken.
Thanks!
This has been known for almost as long as the picture has been around. Still doesn’t allow me to see it.
Incorrect. It is impossible to deduce the “real” color from the photo, both sets are true.
The photo is simply bistable.
You can argue that “the real dress bla bla bla”, but nobody’s looking at the real dress and everyone’s looking at the photo.
As in using the colour picker on the image and finding the corresponding code? That’s actually an explanation that I can get behind. Classic example of trust your instrument.
I see the dress as gold and white, no matter ehow hard I try to see the other side of the coin.
Yup. Really you don’t even need the color picker, as the two horizontal bars seamlessly connecting the two dresses are there to show the same thing.
I think the most fascinating thing about this example image is that I can trick myself into thinking the dress on the left is gold and white. By zooming all the way in so that I can only see the black portion of the dress inside the box and then squinting, it begins to look gold to me. Then scrolling up slowly, the blue portion comes into frame and looks white. It isn’t until I zoom out that the illusion is broken.
I was once able to see the original image as black and blue (though I haven’t managed it today unfortunately), and its baffling how large of a difference it is. You’d think its like some bright sky blue or something, but no, its a deep blue like in the image I sent and our eyes are laughing at us.
Nope. Color cannot be measured, it is created in the brain. Pickers show pixel values (stimulus) and often don’t correlate to the experienced color.
But you could use one I think, and then have that colour isolated and then dump it somewhere
You cannot measure perception with a color picker. Eyes + brain is not a measurement instrument.
Just like you cannot measure amount of salt used in a dish with your tongue.
Yeah, this is the best explanation for why this ‘controvesy’ happened.
Certain background lighting conditions and colors can significantly alter the color and luminance of certain objects in that lighting environment, which otherwise, in less extreme lighting environments, look different.
Even just understanding basic color theory can show you how to make a color pallette out of either mutually complimentary colors, or highly contrasting colors… and how humans largely, (though apparently to differing extents and by different means), interpret a total color space by comparing and contrasting the colors within that space to each other, as opposed to against some objective reference point of all possible colors.
The other part of this explanation is that…
People were not talking about the same image.
Someone would argue one way, another person argues another way, and then someone else would do some kind of photoshop job to argue for one side, and their explanation and reasoning and justification would get lost, and ok now you have multiple images spreading around and being argued over by the same population that would…
… in 5 years, essentially start a civil war over the idea of whether or not it makes sense to wear a mask during an epidemic of a virus transmitted in the aerosolized spittle from sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing.
But yeah, when this was an ongoing thing, I’d have multiple different people in different camps… sending me actually different images, and it took a while to figure out which one was the actual original origin image.
Which of course I had to do on my own, but critical thinking and basic research skills, an impulse to verify the base assumptions of a claim or argument… many people do not know how to do this, or only selectively do it with things that challenge their pre-existing notions.
Yeah that would never happen a war. Imagine of 3 groups of people worshipped the same God, just prayed to him on the floor, to a wall, and to the ceiling.- I’m sure they would get along and be super harmonious.
If theyre the same color, why can i see the black outlines way clearer in the yellow dress w/ blue tint side ?
That would be because the outlines themselves are not the same colors, just the blue/white and black/yellow sections. Here’s an image I quickly edited with the outlines and skin removed, so you can see just how much an effect they have on the image. Both dresses still look normal, but they no longer look like completely different colors when compared together this way.
(edit): And here’s the same image with the outer boxes removed, to show how much the lighting is affecting things, where one of the dresses just looks completely wrong to me now.
I feel so dumb, you did such good work on this and… OK maybe I’ll just take another look in the morning and it’ll make sense
I never understood this concept until you made the outlines the same. That’s the tip i needed to get over the edge. Thanks!
I don’t understand this, can you explain it?
In the left I see a black and blue dress with a yellow box. The dress inside the box is still black and blue (with yellow tint).
In the right side I see a white and gold dress with a blue. box. Inside the box the dress is white and gold, with a blue tint.
What am i supposed to see here? What is this telling me?
The dress inside the [left] box is still black and blue (with yellow tint). Inside the [right] box the dress is white and gold, with a blue tint.
The black and yellow colors inside the boxes are actually the exact same color, and the same goes for the blue and white colors inside the boxes (which is what the seamless bars connecting them is there to demonstrate). But they look completely different, right? The picture is showing us two different ways the exact same colors can be interpreted differently depending on the context surrounding it.
If you go to my profile and look at my comment before this one, I posted two slightly edited versions of the image that better show how they’re the exact same color.
The way this connects to the original image of the dress, is that some people see a gold and white dress because they think the dress is in blue-tinted lighting, as though they were standing in shade. People who see an overexposed image with a bright yellow tint, on the other hand, will likely see a blue and black dress. I couldn’t tell you why it happens, but it’s the way our brains perceive the lighting that’s doing it.
Very interesting. I wonder how big the effect of culture is on how people perceive this situation
I wonder if could be an age component, too? Artificial lighting used to be a lot more yellow. “Party” lighting tends to be more blue.
But the dress in the photo looks like it’s in the shadow so it’s a fair assumption that the lighting would be blue-tinted.
How does it look like it’s in a shadow? The rest of the photo is over exposed like in bright lights so it’s safe to assume that the dress is over exposed too.
You can literally sample the rgb values and see it’s blue and black
Edit: am I part of the joke here??? It’s clearly blue and black…
am I part of the joke here??? It’s clearly blue and black…
The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.
But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.
Optical illusion innit
If anything, I’m more interested in how THAT color is being interpreted than the dress itself. Does it become shade to people because they perceive it relative to the dress? Because, I mean, we know that it is factually light. So how are people perceiving it to be the absence of light? Can you explain that bit?
The brain doesn’t just read raw brightness; it interprets that brightness in relation to what it thinks is going on in the scene.
So when someone sees the dress as white and gold, they’re usually assuming the scene is lit by cool, natural light — like sunlight or shade. That makes the brain treat the lighter areas as a white-ish or light blue material under shadow. The darker areas (what you see as black) become gold or brown, because the brain thinks it’s seeing lighter fabric catching less light.
You, on the other hand, are likely interpreting the lighting as warm and direct — maybe indoor, overexposed lighting. So your brain treats the pale pixels not as light-colored fabric, but as light reflecting off a darker blue surface. The same with the black: it’s being “lightened” by the glare which changes the pixel representation to gold, but you interpret it as black under strong light, not gold.
Hey, just arguing with you in a different comment chain now. So, like, I see the optical illusion. But the background is clearly yellow in the picture? So I don’t understand how your brain is interpreting that part? To me it seems like you’re ignoring the background of the image for this point. Can you go more in depth on that part, specifically? Does that yellow light look blue to you?
Looks like a sunny background and that the dress is in the shade
So the idea is that the dress is, what, covered in an exactly dress shaped and sized amount of shade? Or else why wouldn’t we see shade anywhere else?
Because shade works in 3D and it’s not clear how far away the background is from this picture. But yes, ‘dress shaped and size amounts of shade’ exist; trees, could be on a shaded balcony, etc.
“The phenomenon revealed difference in human color perception…”
Yes, you’re becoming a part of the joke. People LITERALLY see the dress differently. It doesn’t matter what the objective facts are. TBH, it says a lot about humanity. Even when we have evidence that subjective experiences can vary, and even contradict each other, we still end up arguing over whose viewpoint is “correct”.
That we’re curious problem solvers?
Anyway, science has determined that my way is most based
A study carried out by Schlaffke et al. reported that individuals who saw the dress as white and gold showed increased activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain. These areas are thought to be critical in higher cognition activities such as top-down modulation in visual perception
Speak for yourself. I’m a solvem probler.
clearly some problems need to be taken from behind
Solve me Daddy
The lighting of the room is clearly yellow. The black stripes look to be a very glossy material, which when lit with yellow light reflects goldish. There’s no way that lighting turns a white dress blue.
The lighting of the room is clearly yellow.
That’s not clear to me. The dress looks like it’s in the shade.
Look at everything to the right of the dress, even to the left. Everything is illuminated with bright, yellowish light.
See, it always looked to me like blue light (or maybe shadow) around the dress itself, where the only sense it makes to my brain is that the fabric is white.
Whatever is to the right and behind the dress is definitely in bright yellow light.
Behind the dress, yes. No one’s disputing that. The difference between that bright light and the dress itself makes it look like it’s in shadow, at least to some of us.
Yes, and a room with that kind of lighting wouldn’t make a white dress look blue. Just the radiant light from those surroundings proves that it can’t be in that kind of shadow.
What room? It looks like we’re looking at the back of an object that’s facing out into bright sunlight.
Whatever the setting is, it appears to be bathed in bright sunlight. That’s the important part.
The front of it presumably is. But the back, that we’re looking at, seems to be in shade.
Light bounces around. That’s the whole point of ray tracing. Even if the dress were not in direct light, the light bouncing around the environment would prevent the kind of shade necessary for that.
I dunno. It’s clearly a blue and black dress in a washed-out photo.
I guess I’m just used to seeing washed-out photos, and mentally adjusting the “whitepoint/exposure” (I’m not a photographer) in my brain or whatever.
I have washed out Polaroids from my childhood, so. I don’t think there’s any great mystery here.
If you tilt the photo around on your phone you can start to see it turn black and blue. IIRC it’s because the phenomenon depends on the angle viewed at
You can sample the colours and see it’s white with a very light blue tinge and gold.
People who see it as blue and black are (correctly in this case) auto-correcting for the yellow light as the dress itself is black and blue.
Whereas people who see it as white and gold are (subconsciously) assuming a blue shadow and seeing the pixels as they’re displayed.
You selected the brightest highlights on the dress. I selected more average colors here. I also included WHITE AND GOLD next to the selected colors, so you can see what they actually look like. Are you really saying that blue is white and brown-grey is gold?
Well you would select the brightest bit to get an idea of the bit that was least impacted by the shadow.
But yes still closer to white and gold than (dark) blue and black
You’re good. It’s black and blue. At a pinch, maybe blue and black.
Where the hell is the black supposed to be? Nothing is that dark here. I can easily accept blue, white, or gold, but there’s clearly no black.
You can literally sample the rgb values
It doesn’t matter. This phenomenon can be explained by something called color constancy.
I remember some versions of this image where I could literally switch between perceptions at will, when I imagined different surrounding light temperatures/environments.
It’s a subjective perception.
I can literally switch between perceptions with this exact image. It’s sort of like that “are there six cubes or ten” illusion. Depending on how I look at it, I can see either one.
Exactly. Or that silhouette of a spinning ballerina. I can switch the direction that she is spinning at will as well. There’s nothing to go by because it’s a perfectly flat, projected silhouette without any shadows, so anybody is free to interpret the rotation however they like. 😁
What is global illumination from sky lighting again ??
Carcinogenic.
It’s very clearly white and gold.
Color is created in the brain, not in the pixel values. Pixel values often have no correlation to the color that’s produced in the brain.
Stop trolling me. It’s blue and black. I could never figure how people might perceive it otherwise.
They see the blue as shaded white, and the glossy black has enough yellow reflected in it that they think it is shadowy gold. Basically, you’re seeing the dress as if it’s lit from the front. You see the colors as blue and black, because that’s what’s on the screen. But other people’s brains decide that the dress is backlit, so the colors facing the camera are actually shaded.
I can see both so I promise you it’s not a troll, but it is a wild phenomenon.
Same, I always assume the ppl. Saying it’s black and blue are trolling me.
When the discussion started, I saw white and gold too. Then, at some point, I saw blue and black and since then I’ve never been able to see it as white and gold again.
Then you clearly have a brain/eye defect because not only does it look black and blue, but the actual dress in real life is black and blue.
And you are obviously right. I can see it with my own eyes.
