That dress

[Prest_400]

Hey there,

Yesterday a friend passed me the famous dress of diverse colours. Turns out that someone posted a bad photo (cellphone, smudged lens, bad light) of a dress asking for the perception of colour, and it has become all the rage.
I don't frequent that part of the internet that makes you lose countless hours with stupìd stuff, but this is quite photography related.

Here's the tumblr:
http://swiked.tumblr.com/post/112073818575/guys-please-help-me-is-this-dress-white-and

Infact, XKCD didn't take much time to publish a comic about it.
http://xkcd.com/1492/

I've been photographing for quite a while and I've picked up basic colour theory and management.
My take is: Wrong Color balance, open shade, and probably some strange voodoo done by the camera software in the shadows. Add in that it is a minuscule overcompressed web jpg without any color management and the diverse screens.

What do you think? I just had to ask/discuss with other photographers 😀 The talk about WB and color crossover with non-photographer friends just gets me promptly ignored.
The world is getting divided by two because of this 😛

 

[Sparrow]

... just like people can tell what colour that bag is, even when it isn't that colour

people's colour perception is much better than medium allows

 

[dmr]

I just commented on this on "another network" and I would be interested in what all of you think is the key to the illusion.

My guess is the bizarre and unusual lighting. Look at the daylight backlight and the key light coming from top camera left.

Comments?

 

[FrankS]

. . .

 

[Sparrow]

I just commented on this on "another network" and I would be interested in what all of you think is the key to the illusion.

My guess is the bizarre and unusual lighting. Look at the daylight backlight and the key light coming from top camera left.

Comments?

... something to do with the saturation, just look at the backgrounds.

That and a completely un-calibrated production and display system, a lot of the interweb is like that few sites go to the trouble of making sure of their presentation ... I sent a shirt back to Charles Tyrwhitt just yesterday that was way off colour

 

[sevo]

Comments?

Plain overexposure, nothing beyond it.

 

[dmr]

Plain overexposure, nothing beyond it.

Yes, that may be the bulk of it. I can play with the levels and get it to appear blue and dark grey.

 

[rluka]

What do you think? I just had to ask/discuss with other photographers 😀 The talk about WB and color crossover with non-photographer friends just gets me promptly ignored.
The world is getting divided by two because of this 😛

My first reaction is, questioning if the problem is: "the colour you see in that picture" or "the colour of the real dress"
What I get, "you're no fun"
*sigh*

 

[bobbyrab]

People are seeing different colours to one another viewing it on the same screen, it's just a combination of colour information that happens to highlight the differences of how we perceive colour, I suspect those seeing it as blue and black are slightly colourblind.

 

[FrankS]

The actual dress is blue/black, says the dressmaker.

 

[bobbyrab]

The actual dress is blue/black, says the dressmaker.

Yes but the camera has cleverly screwed with exposure and WB, the majority see a clear gold and white, although I see quite a bit of blue in the white, but it's still white in my perception

 

[Particular]

Don't these moms, aunts, and grannies know they are supposed to include a colorchecker card in the frame before posting pictures of dresses on the Internet? Sheesh!

 

[FrankS]

Yes but the camera has cleverly screwed with exposure and WB, the majority see a clear gold and white, although I see quite a bit of blue in the white, but it's still white in my perception

I don't know about the majority. In my house, my wife sees white/gold but my son and I see blue/black, as did all of my son's friends. (He reported)

 

[kxl]

I don't know about the majority. In my house, my wife sees white/gold but my son and I see blue/black, as did all of my son's friends. (He reported)

Exactly. It has less to do with photography than it does with how the brain perceives color and how that perception is different from person to person. Regardless of how it was exposed or manipulated, some people actually do see blue and black when looking at the final image while others see white and gold.

The actual dress is blue and black, but I personally see white (with a bluish hue) and gold.

 

[Solinar]

I've noticed that some digital cameras, especially on cell phones, don't handle black fabric very well. I've shopped for camera bags on eBay that I know to be black in color and the image shows them to be gray or even brown. Some type of problem occurs with the auto white balance software.

Does anyone remember the hub bub concerning the Leica M8 without the add-on E39 infrared filter?

 

[Prest_400]

I just remember now thinking about the Zone System. The brutal overexposure pushes up all the tones, and that blue becomes a white with blue cast.

Does anyone remember the hub bub concerning the Leica M8 without the add-on E39 infrared filter?

That was infact the first thought I had. Spillover IR plus bad WB. I did a brief research on the M8 problem and the IR gave a magenta, not golden cast. There was a mention somewhere of it happening with synthetic fabrics, like in this garment.

The workflow doesn't help. AFAIK, no information on the camera used. A cheap cellphone module for sure is helping screwing those shadows.

As of perception, I guess that could extend a lot into how everyone differs and that language isn't very good at describing such fine nuances.

Reminds me of describing sound and discussions in music-audiophile forums "muddy mids, boomy bass, too bright, lack of air, etc"

 

[dmr]

Plain overexposure, nothing beyond it.

Or? It's obvious that the outside background is overexposed. Could it be that the foreground is UNDERexposed and they tried to correct it, resulting in the bizarre color shift?

 

[jloden]

It's just overexposure, really, really incorrect white balance, and the combination doing a phenomenal job of sitting right on the boundary of where people's brain processes color perception.

I saw white and gold at first until I scrolled down and blocking the top part of the image caused my brain to 're-calibrate' and perceive it as blue and black. Interestingly, once that happened I found with a little effort that I could actually switch back and forth at will between seeing it as white/gold or blue/black, which was an interesting experience 😀

If you take the image and correct the white balance in Lightroom or Photoshop, it's obviously blue and black. Conversely, if you take the catalog image from the manufacturer's website and set the white balance point to use the blue fabric as neutral, you'll get a similar result to the original viral image.