
What happened?
“SWIKED,” a user on the Tumblr platform, posted a picture of her new dress. She asked for help because she asked:
“Guys, help me! Is this dress blue and black or white and gold ? My friends and I all see it differently and we almost freak out!”
It's being shared and discussed like crazy on Facebook.
Within just a few hours, “White and Gold” became a trending topic on Twitter and crazy theories were spread under the hashtag #dressgate. For example, it is said that users with a negative attitude to life are more likely to recognize the colors blue and white.
Adobe itself took on the matter and analyzed it!
The color analysis was published on Adobe's Twitter page. According to Adobe, the dress is BLUE and BLACK!

But why exactly is the perception so different?
Scientifically speaking, this is a type of optical illusion and a peculiarity of digital photography. If an image is overexposed, the so-called white point, i.e. the brightest part of the image, shifts. If an image is underexposed, the black point, the darkest part of the image, shifts.
The dress itself in this picture would be underexposed in a normal photo, which is due to the bright background or the backlight that causes this. The camera tried to compensate for this and adjusted the exposure so that the dress appeared “normal” but the background was too bright.
This can create the impression of a very bright background bathed in blazing sunlight, which we will discuss again later.
This is what the so-called tonal value spread of the unchanged image looks like in Adobe Photoshop. The dark areas on the left, the light areas on the right:

If you now try to “artificially” overexpose the image further, you will see that the “white-gold trend” continues (white point is moved, see red arrow).

If you try to undo the overexposure (black point is moved, see red arrow) until the background that you can see at the right edge looks “normal”, you can see the real colors of the dress:

What is crucial, however, is that this correction in the lower image does not cause significantly more blue components to “creep” into the image, but rather a large part of the change happens in our brain without us noticing!
How does that work?
The phenomenon that comes into play when viewing is the so-called color constancy . This principle ensures that we perceive colors as always the same, always constant, regardless of the light in the environment. A lemon always appears yellow to us in sunlight, in the light of a light bulb and in the light of a neon tube (with only very small differences, which are not significant and we have no direct comparison).
Would you like a small example?
In the image below we see squares A and B differently because the brain identifies A as dark and B as light due to the fact that it is a checkerboard pattern. Due to the shadow of the green cylinder, the fields have exactly the same shade of gray. But that wouldn't fit into the checkerboard pattern, which is why the brain corrects it and we perceive the fields as different so that the "rest of the world" is still correct. On the right side of the image we have hidden this “rest of the world”. Result: The brain no longer sees the need to adjust anything anywhere and we see the true color of the field.

Our brain makes this adjustment without us being aware of it, and it's usually not noticeable at all . Strawberries are always red, lemons are always yellow and oranges are always orange. Although everyone perceives a slightly different red, yellow and orange, there is no dispute about the “true” color of the lemon. In any case, there has never been such a discussion about fruit online… 😉
This dress is different...
So when we see this dress, the brain also interprets the surroundings: what kind of light is falling into the room and how does it affect the colors?
Now we come back to the question of the exposure of the image that we mentioned above. Not much of the background can be seen, so the brain thinks of all the missing information independently. The interpretation of glaring sunlight mentioned above is obvious.
So the brains of people who see gold and white interpret it as bright sunlight with a blue sky. In the (subconscious) conclusion that the dress only has a slight shadow because everything is so light, it further interprets that the dress is a slightly bluish-gray shaded white and the gold appears a bit washed out due to the backlight. In the “world” of these people’s brains, everything is right. That would also be plausible – everything is fine…right?
Not quite! There are also brains (and we're talking about brains here, not people - as already mentioned, this all happens unconsciously, you have no influence on it!) that interpret the scene differently: the background is in their "world". warm artificial light – perhaps that of a shop. The dress is in partial shade and appears almost a little dark. This literally throws a different light on the dress, the scene is interpreted under completely different conditions: the dress is blue and black.
But why such a stark difference? Two shades of gray are still understandable, but blue with white and black with gold?
In general, people perceive warm colors better than cold ones. In addition, we have fewer receptors for blue on the retina (only around 12%, the rest is distributed between red and green), so our eyes provide significantly less “blue information”, which is why perception can be easily tricked: through the Brightness of the monitor/smartphone, the angle of the display, glasses/contact lenses, the current mood, almost everything. For example, I belonged to the “gold and white faction” until I took off my glasses. Details were immediately missing in the picture (myopia), my brain “rethought” and I saw the dress in blue and black. Now I happily switch back and forth between the two variants, which feels very strange... 😉
As previously mentioned, such misinterpretations are particularly important when it comes to shades of blue. For example, if the dress had been red, it wouldn't have mattered much what happened around the dress.
It's fascinating what the brain does with our image perception without us noticing, isn't it?
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )


