
The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress - andrewfong
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/
======
cafebeen
Well, without knowing the light source, it's _impossible_ to accurately
measure color. They mention applying white balancing to fix it, but this makes
an _assumption_ of some characteristic light source:

[http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-
balance.htm](http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm)

Beyond that, there is processing done by the sensor, the photo app, the person
who put it online, etc...

~~~
jacobolus
That’s not quite it. More precisely, it’s always impossible to measure
“color”, because color is a perception in the brain, not a physical fact about
the environment.

But it’s certainly possible to make a good guess at the light source by
looking at objects in the scene. In this particular case, we can look at the
black and white dress at bottom left, which we can reasonably expect will
appear neutral to human eyes and most “properly white balanced” camera images.

I’ll agree that the camera used here has a relatively crummy sensor /
processing pipeline though.

~~~
cafebeen
Yes, but the spectrum of the light hitting the eye _is_ a physical thing.

The physical problem is that multiple environments can make the same spectrum,
e.g. is it a bluish light source & white dress or white light and bluish
dress. White balancing can fix this if you know the light source, e.g. the
sun, but that's either an assumption or something calibrated separately from
the image.

That said, the perceptual issues are certainly a problem as well :)

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ChuckMcM
Looks like someone has rediscovered what Edwin Land pointed out in 1959 [1]
which is that the perception of a color depends on what is around it. There
was a great video of Land walking with a square of one color from background
to background in a single shot and the color of the square appears to change
as he changes backgrounds.

[1] [http://www.millenuvole.org/f/Fotografia/Per-quali-ragioni-
ve...](http://www.millenuvole.org/f/Fotografia/Per-quali-ragioni-vediamo-i-
colori/edwin_land_1959.pdf)

~~~
mod
But the perception is different per individual, not per "what's around it."

Further, the image's colors is changing somewhat spontaneously for some
people, including my girlfriend.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Edwin, who went on to create the Land Camera (Polaroid) noted exactly the same
thing. And he realized that the _reproduction_ of color was not nearly as
straight forward as people thought it should be ('just add the primary
colors'). This particular image is a great example because it sits right on
the edge of what you're eyes perceive.

Everyone is seeing this image through a color reproducing display. And that
display has approximations in terms of the color frequencies it can display.
That combines with the way our eyes perceive color and gives us different
views of it. On my Moto G for example I can change the color people perceive
by changing the brightness of the screen. Same picture just different
brightness levels.

------
scoopr
Initially I saw white & gold, and I kinda still see it that way. The
assumption I noticed I had is that there is a window behind, which gives out a
bluer shade of light than the store lights. On closer inspection, the blue
tint doesn't quite match that assumption and that the dress must have a blue
tint. I cannot unsee the gold shade, but thinking about it, it could very well
be the store lights that cast the yellowish tint.

------
gormo2
I can see the blue and the white but I cannot see black. Even the darkest
images I'm still seeing a gold tint. Can anyone help me out?

~~~
jacobolus
The “gold tint” is due to the camera white balance. Does it still look gold if
we adjust it so that the background white + black dress is neutral?

[http://i.imgur.com/jtjECtR.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/jtjECtR.jpg)

~~~
gormo2
I still see gold tint to that image, and it is far from black, which I
verified by opening the color in photoshop.

And I'm confused about your point about the camera white balance. It doesn't
matter what is causing the "gold tint" only that I am seeing it and others
vehemently claim they see no gold tint. The point is there is a perception
difference that is not being accounted for. I mean, I understand how the
shoddy white balance makes what in reality is black fabric shift gold/orange
in a photo, but objectively in the original photograph the bands of fabric are
not black or gray but a muddy gold color, so I do not understand how anyone
sees it as black.

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nilkn
I saw this a few hours ago and the dress was _very_ clearly white and gold.

I just looked at it again and it is black and blue.

This is quite the trip.

The only difference I can think of is that earlier I was in a bright, well-lit
room, and now I'm sitting in bed in a pitch black room (other than the
screen). Maybe my adjusting to the change in my own ambient lighting led to
the change in perception?

~~~
jasey
I saw it on my iPhone, I thought it was clearly gold and white.

Had a discussion about it with a colleague (he saw it as clearly blue and
black). I got up to go check his monitor and as I got closer it changed colour
right before my eyes.

I went back to my desk and checked my phone and it had ___changed_ __to blue
and black. MIND = BLOWN

I've not been able to see it as gold and white ever since...

I'm so confused lol

~~~
nilkn
It's back to white and gold for me.

I'm also now in a well-lit room next to a large window with natural light as
well. I'm curious to see how long this correlation continues.

------
lettergram
I used computer vision to prove the image shouldn't be perceived as black and
blue to us.

[http://austingwalters.com/that-dress-is-gold-and-
white/](http://austingwalters.com/that-dress-is-gold-and-white/)

A bit about myself, I've been doing research into this very thing for the past
two years at UIUC.

~~~
jacobolus
I hope you’re joking. Speaking as someone who has spent many hundreds of hours
reading color science papers, and another several thousand hours color-
correcting photos in CIELAB space, your analysis is absurd.

If you ever come to San Francisco, I’ll be happy to explain why over a coffee.

~~~
lettergram
Perhaps I went a bit eccentric, the same way the news stories were going :)

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mruocco
Still interesting is the differences in who perceives it differently. Take the
survey :
[http://digitalorchard.co/dress/survey.html](http://digitalorchard.co/dress/survey.html)

~~~
mitchty
I see it as more gold and a blueish white hue. So not taking that survey cause
it seems to constrict me into some weird combination I can't agree with.

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PhantomGremlin
I haven't seen this link posted in this discussion about this dress.

[http://news.yahoo.com/debates-rage-over-color-dress-
photogra...](http://news.yahoo.com/debates-rage-over-color-dress-photographed-
rare-light-163138620.html)

The reason it's interesting is it shows a storefront window with the dress. I
think it really helps put the original image into context. Especially check
out the contrast between the blue dress and the very white mannequin. Nobody
who sees that picture will ever think the dress itself is white.

------
jacobolus
I’m so confused. Is it people looking at the dress in person that think it
looks white?

Someone looking at this photo on a reasonably standard (or reasonably well
characterized) LCD display which their eyes have adapted to is going to pretty
much see all of the three versions falling between “pale blue” and “dark
blue”. Given the yellow background, proper “white balance” would make the
dress look even bluer (see example below). Either way, seems like the photo
was taken with a pretty bad-quality cellphone camera. Maybe people have just
learned to predict color in pictures from some specific cellphone cameras with
awful sensors and processing? Or maybe someone spent 20 minutes staring at
something bright blue, and then switched quickly to looking at the photo?

What am I missing here? Does anyone here think the image makes the dress look
white?

(Also, there’s not much “science” in this wired post at all. Edit: in response
to the below comment, the businessinsider post is also pretty shoddy
“science”.)

Edit:

One of the nicest online sources about this topic is
[http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color4.html#chromainduct](http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color4.html#chromainduct)
; the rest of that site is in general the best online source about human color
vision. (There are better sources, but you’ll need to go to a university
library to read them.)

I wouldn’t claim to be a professional color scientist, but I’m about as much
an expert on this topic as you’ll ever find among amateurs. If someone wants a
3-hour lecture in person about the science of human color vision, I’d be happy
to oblige (but you have to come to an SF coffeeshop for it; could also be a
shorter or longer lecture, depending).

Here’s the original image vs. one I “white balanced” to make the obviously
white & black dress in the background appear neutral. Does the foreground
dress still look white + gold?

orig: [http://i.imgur.com/g461GBr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/g461GBr.jpg) ; white
balanced: [http://i.imgur.com/jtjECtR.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/jtjECtR.jpg)
(and I actually cheated a bit toward leaving the blue less intense than I
would typically make it if color correcting this image)

In any event, I still can’t explain why people are seeing this dress as white.
I now think that it’s likely to be unfamiliarity looking at digital
photographs and/or some weird adaptation effect, e.g. looking at a dim phone
screen while outside in the shade on a sunny day. Or maybe perception is being
colored by a general expectation of white dresses (people often substitute
colors in this way when they look at e.g. fire hydrants, human skin, clouds,
or grass, interpreting the color based on past experience despite weird
lighting conditions).

~~~
callmeed
Yes, to me the dress looks gold and white. Granted, we're looking at a side of
the dress which is in shade (thus there's a tint). But, in my mind, the dress
is clearly white and gold.

My wife, on the other hand, first saw it as blue and black. Later it seemed to
change for her.

~~~
jacobolus
The only way you’d get a “tint” like this on a white dress in the shade,
indoors, in a room with yellowish lighting (look at the background) is if you
shone a bright blue spotlight at it.

~~~
koliber
In real life, you are right. However, this picture was taken with a camera,
which did some auto white balancing internally. Perhaps the camera chose to
use the yellow background as the reference for white-balancing, causing the
less "white" dress a bluish tint.

You cannot just consider the natural image here. I am sure that if we got
everyone to examine the dress in real life, there would be a lot less
confusion.

I bet a good part of the confusion is caused by faulty in-camera white
balancing.

------
ConfuciusSay
The only thing this scientifically proves is that marketing agencies are
getting better and better at viral marketing.

Imagine that, that very same dress is now back in stock. Purchase one today!
[http://www.romanoriginals.co.uk/](http://www.romanoriginals.co.uk/)

------
amelius
It looks like a white and gold coloured dress, which was accidentally washed
with a blue sock :)

------
codezero
Slightly tangential, are there any computer vision algorithms that react to
optical illusions in the same way human vision does?

~~~
jacobolus
You’ll need to elaborate. There are hundreds of different “optical illusions”,
because human vision is extremely complex with numerous processing steps and
many types of adaptation. There’s no single “algorithm” that responds to
images the way a human responds.

If you can narrow your question down to a few effects, and figure out what you
want your algorithm to do (classify images? print a nice picture to hang on
your wall compensating for different scene lighting? detect object boundaries?
predict what color name a human will attach to a particular object?), then it
should be possible to find or make a program that does that. (At least in
principle. Really depends how sophisticated your goals are.)

~~~
codezero
I don't want an algorithm to do anything. I am not in the field, and I was
curious whether any computer vision systems account for any (not all) optical
illusions that humans are susceptible to. It's just a curiosity.

------
warrick
What I haven't seen mentioned as a factor is eye color.

I have blue eyes and see the dress as blue and black.

~~~
jacobolus
The pigment in your iris has nothing to do with the colors you see.

~~~
warrick
Eye color affects contrast and glare perception.

------
anigbrowl
There's a joke on film sets: Why don't more Directors of Photography smoke?
Because it takes 3 hours to light.

Typically the director chooses one or more angles for viewing the action of a
scene, and then the production designer makes sure that whatever appears
within the frame (wallpaper, props, furniture) looks right. Then the Director
of Photography's, or DP's, job begins.

The basics of lighting involve setting up areas of light and shadow, of the
kind you know if you enjoy black-and-white films. But from there, building a
consistent color balance for a scene is an enormous amount of work. There are
multiple different sorts of lights (incandescent, flourescent, LED, HMI), each
with different color temperatures (often switched in and out within the same
fitting), which are in turn modified with varying thicknesses of colored gel
and which have to match the diegetic light sources - ie those which will
appear on screen as part of the 'story world'. Sunlight is blue. So's
moonlight, but not _as_ blue - if it's too blue then it looks like a blue
light instead of a white moon. Interior lamps have their own color
temperature, which usually tilts orange. Then you have to deal with multiple
lights; typically there's a key light illuminating the subject, a back light
which helps to isolate the subject from the background (so the actors don't
look like they have a tree growing out of their head or something - longer
lenses flatten perspective and make it hard to differentiate foreground and
background at narrow apertures) and a diffused fill light to balance these
more intense point sources and obscure their artificiality, without losing the
selective quality of the illumination. Each of these has to be color-balanced
separately. Complex scenes sometimes require 6 or seven light sources. If
you're shooting interior scenes and it's not essential to look out the window,
it's often preferable to just black out all the windows or shoot at night, and
employ artificial lights instead of the sun.

Here's an example of what it takes to make a scene look 'natural':
[https://plus.google.com/photos/109568505224923852682/albums/...](https://plus.google.com/photos/109568505224923852682/albums/5884382003578185713/5884427087396987378?banner=pwa&pid=5884427087396987378&oid=109568505224923852682&authkey=CJbl8Ne5t7vGcQ)
What you can't see here is that the lower halves of the windows are covered
with multiple sheets of neutral-density filter gets, gut to size (whereas the
unfiltered upper parts of the window are just a glow of overexposure). that's
several hours of work before it's even worth turning the camera on.

Shooting outside in sunlight should be simpler, right? Nope - you need
reflectors (White? Gold? Silver? it depends), flags to take light _off_ the
hot spots, large silks for diffusion (which require extensive rigging to hold
what is essentially a small parachute and prevent it flapping in the breeze),
and people able to reliably adjust everything during the shot if the camera or
the subject is moving. Also, the motion of the earth around the sub means that
the position of everything needs to be tweaked about every 15 minutes as you
do more takes and shoot things from different angles, all of which have to
look completely consistent later on even if the source footage was shot hours
apart. Also the color of the sun changes depending on the time of day.

Lighting for film is a massive headache most of the time* which is why you
just don't see certain clothing combinations on film. A dress like this is
enough to make an industry veteran cry.

* unless it's mild and overcast. Moderate cloud cover basically doubles productivity for daylight photography.

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DougN7
To me it is clearly blue and gold/brown. So what does THAT mean?

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blueskin_
It looks blue and black to me. Can't see any white.

Very interesting analysis.

------
icebraining
Today's xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/1492/](http://xkcd.com/1492/)

~~~
nilkn
I don't think this explains it fully. This shows how the perceived color has a
dependence on the background, but not how it has a dependence on the observer
as well.

In fact, for me, I saw it as white and gold at first. Now, several hours
later, it's black and blue and I can't see the gold at all. The background of
the image didn't change.

