The Dress

[Loony BoB]

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that a pixelated image where you only see a small portion of what is actually there outside of the dress allows for it to be pretty easily seen as the colours that make up 80 percent of the image xD

I wonder what people would see if you cropped out that small source of light in the image and showed nothing but dress.

[Spuuky]

If you sufficiently cropped it such that it didn't have any indication about the lighting of the original photo? Umm, I guess if you zoomed way in on a specific portion such that you lose any sense of context, yes, it could be hard to tell what color it was in reality.

Tell me what word this is, if it wasn't cut off:

nderstandable

If you come up with an answer other than the obvious one, there's something wrong with the linguistic center of your brain.

Now tell me what word this is:

s

That's the same word, but with more cut out. See how that's a stupid question?

The dress, in this analogy, is something like this:

nderstandab

It's clearly discernable unless your eyes and brain just can't reconcile things correctly for some reason. A white-and-gold viewer would say "this isn't a word." A blue-and-gold viewer would say "the first example isn't a word." A blue-and-black viewer would say "the word is 'understandable' in both cases."

[Galuf]

If you sufficiently cropped it such that it didn't have any indication about the lighting of the original photo? Umm, I guess if you zoomed way in on a specific portion such that you lose any sense of context, yes, it could be hard to tell what color it was in reality.

Tell me what word this is, if it wasn't cut off:

nderstandable

If you come up with an answer other than the obvious one, there's something wrong with the linguistic center of your brain.

Now tell me what word this is:

s

That's the same word, but with more cut out. See how that's a stupid question?

The dress, in this analogy, is something like this:

nderstandab

It's clearly discernable unless your eyes and brain just can't reconcile things correctly for some reason. A white-and-gold viewer would say "this isn't a word." A blue-and-gold viewer would say "the first example isn't a word." A blue-and-black viewer would say "the word is 'understandable' in both cases."

b-but i see white and gold. and i see understandable for both examples right off the bat. does that mean im insane?

[Spuuky]

It's an analogy. Colors/light and words/shapes are not processed the same way as each other.

[Loony BoB]

That analogy doesn't reflect what's going on in the image (although I'm not sure how you can even compare lighting to words, but let's just go with it for the sake of ... I don't know what).

Lighting is the thing that is important and is how you judge the actual colour of the dress, according to what science is throwing at us.

However, there is very little lighting. So really, the clue to the colour change we are seeing is

u le



But yeah, seriously, I don't think that analogy works at all. xD I also don't think 68% of internet users are all somehow suffering from some horrible inability to see colour correctly. I wonder if an image editing expert were to get an image of a pale violet and muddy orange dress and add lighting on the background if people would see it as black and blue.

[Spuuky]

However, there is very little lighting.

?????? I found your problem.

[Loony BoB]

Sorry, I should say very little visible sources of lighting. There is the top right corner, absolutely, but it's behind the dress and has a lot of glare in the upper right corner. If you don't show the sources of lighting (sans glare) and how they affect anything then it makes it more difficult to discern how the lighting is affecting various things. We don't see much of any other dresses or people or (more notably) known colours to compare and contrast with. The lighting on things behind the dress is very different to the lighting provided to the dress itself.

[Spuuky]

You don't need other things in the picture to compare with. You just need to know what glare is and what its presence indicates (extremely bright light).

[Loony BoB]

Extremely bright light behind something could mean any kind of thing, usually it involves making something appear darker (not lighter).

[Spuuky]

Conclusion confirmed, I've found your problem. Overexposed photos do not darken objects.

[WildRaubtier]

My favourite thing about this thread is how close its getting to vision-based eugenics.

[Mirage]

Extremely bright light behind something could mean any kind of thing, usually it involves making something appear darker (not lighter).

So you have one thing that indicates not-blue lighting, and zero things that indicates blue lighting. Unless your room has blue lighting instead of the white-yellow lighting that is common almost everywhere.

[Loony BoB]

If there was blue lighting I'd be seeing this as black and blue, surely. xD I see it as a pale violet and a bronze-like colour.

I don't feel I have enough to assume that this picture is overexposed (I mean, I know it is, but my brain is looking at the actual image, and what I see is more like this - a bright light behind something makes it appear darker than it actually is, not lighter.

[Shlup]

Oh my god we're still talking about that smurfing dress.

I mean, I find it super interesting, especially having seen it in both colors myself, but damn.

[Old Manus]