So if you're on tumblr at all you've probably heard of this pic/dress. Some people see it as blue and black some people see it as white and gold. I can guarantee the image isn't resetting or anything because I was looking at it with Dakhamunzu and we both saw it differently. I will also mention Dak wears glasses and stared into the sun as a child because she wanted to wear glasses...
And here's a post explaining it but I can't say with 100% certainty that it's accurate.
Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There’s rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part. The “cones” see color. The “rods” see shade, like black, white and grey. Cones only work when enough light passes through. So while I see the fabric as white, someone else may see it as blue because my cones aren’t responding to the dim lighting. My rods see it as a shade (white). There’s three cones, small, medium and large. They are blue sensitive, green sensitive, and red sensitive. As for the black bit (which I see as gold), it’s called additive mixing. Blue, green and red are the main colors for additive mixing. This is where it gets really tricky. Subtractive mixing, such as with paint, means the more colors you add the murkier it gets until it’s black. ADDITIVE mixing, when you add the three colors eyes see best, red, green and blue, (not to be confused with primary colors red, blue and yellow) it makes pure white.
—Blue and Black: In conclusion, your retina’s cones are more high functioning, and this results in your eyes doing subtractive mixing.
—White and Gold: our eyes don’t work well in dim light so our retinas rods see white, and this makes them less light sensitive, causing additive mixing, (that of green and red), to make gold.
Rather than an optical illusion, it's apparently a quirk of human vision. There're quite a few articles out there about it, but I wasn't interested enough to go hunting all of them down for the truth. At the very least, it's not an elaborate sham or joke... probably.
I was curious and opened the pic in GIMP and did some colour sampling. The dress body is definitely in the blue range, no doubt about it. The frills/embellishments are a bit trickier, they're all sampling in the gold-brown ranges [particularly noticeable at the top] but I'm pretty sure the issue is the quality of lighting washing out a black satin/sheer material.
A couple people I follow on twitter ended up with similar results:
Basically the same as my findings [bar the range on the bottom, where my blends tended darker]
Colour corrected it's definitely black/blue, with aberrations coming from photo quality/lighting/angle/et cetera
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Girls hit your hallelujah!
'CAUSE PUPTOWN FUNK GON' GIVE TO YA
Ixion tells you, "// I don't think anyone else had a clue, amazing form."
Is...is it a dog?
No, it's a bat.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Your eyes have retinas, the things that let you interpret color. There’s rods, round things, and cones that stick out, which is what gives your eye a textured appearance in the colored part. The “cones” see color. The “rods” see shade, like black, white and grey. Cones only work when enough light passes through. So while I see the fabric as white, someone else may see it as blue because my cones aren’t responding to the dim lighting. My rods see it as a shade (white). There’s three cones, small, medium and large. They are blue sensitive, green sensitive, and red sensitive.
As for the black bit (which I see as gold), it’s called additive mixing. Blue, green and red are the main colors for additive mixing. This is where it gets really tricky. Subtractive mixing, such as with paint, means the more colors you add the murkier it gets until it’s black. ADDITIVE mixing, when you add the three colors eyes see best, red, green and blue, (not to be confused with primary colors red, blue and yellow) it makes pure white.
—Blue and Black: In conclusion, your retina’s cones are more high functioning, and this results in your eyes doing subtractive mixing.
—White and Gold: our eyes don’t work well in dim light so our retinas rods see white, and this makes them less light sensitive, causing additive mixing, (that of green and red), to make gold.
Ixion tells you, "// I don't think anyone else had a clue, amazing form."
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
NARF!
EDIT: Actually, at a second glance, now I can see golden/blue-ish... what?
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Vive l'apostrophe!
NARF!
Ixion tells you, "// I don't think anyone else had a clue, amazing form."
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
Ixion tells you, "// I don't think anyone else had a clue, amazing form."
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.