This is Weird

I saw a bit on a news program last night about a picture of a dress on this web site.

Take a look at the picture and report what colors the dress appears to you. If there is someone else around ask him/her what color the dress appears to be.

I just saw an interview with a woman, I think the designer, who was wearing the dress, and she said it was blue and black. Sure enough, on her, it looked blue and black. However, in the photograph that has caused all the fuss, it looks to me like it's white and gold or maybe pale blue and gold (the lighting is obviously strange). They even did a brief split screen with the woman on the left and the photo on the right, and it looked like two different versions of the same pattern to me. I don't know what they did to the photo to change the colors.

I don't think they did anything to the picture on the web site. About three quarters of people report that the dress appears to be gold and white. The others mostly say blue and black.

Last night I saw the dress as bronze and light blue. I called my wife in and she saw it as gold and white. This morning, I looked again and saw the dress as black and dark blue. My wife came down and looked at it and saw the same colors she did last night. She couldn't believe that I saw blue and black.

Richard,

If you go here, you can download a small program (it's safe) that will read the RGB content of pixels on your monitor. Try it on the dress image and see what colors are actually being displayed. Quite surprising.

If you want to make sure the program is working for you, try it on this image to prove that the colors of the squares marked A and B are exactly the same.

This dress story actually made the evening news Friday -- both Mrs NoCo and I saw it as white + gold. In the news story they showed some photos of the dress in question under normal lighting and it's definitely dark blue + black.

Weird light reflections, I guess. Don't see what all the hubbub is about -- but then I cannot see blue in the picture either.

"Weird light reflections" on the dress when the picture was taken would not explain why you see the colors you do. What you are seeing is not light reflections from the dress, but light emitted from your monitor. If you use that tool I linked to, you will see that your monitor is actually producing black and blue colors.

I find this very interesting. The countless times I have set the white balance on a camera, I never considered that our brains are doing essentially the same thing all the time. Like most people, the white balance on my cameras is normally set to Auto. But there are times when the result is not acceptable and I have to set it manually. Apparently, our brains are also capable of not producing the correct result when set on Auto.