The Dress

[Saidur_Ali]

Still not been able to see it looking like white yet after seeing on a few more displays.

 

[G.T.Ace]

I think all you blue/black folk need to calibrate your screens and also try this out.

My result:

View attachment 317733​

Got 0, yey, I guess.

 

[Soundtrack]

This “buzz” or whatever you may call it is far from stupid/pointless from my perspective. Color fidelity is part of my work. I’ve been shooting (GretagMacbeth) X-Rite’s ColorCheckers for quite some time now, spend countless hours trying to manage multiple visual chains (print/video/film), fine tune 8/16/32 bit pictures with almost infinitesimal control, analyze samples with spectrophotometers, vector-scopes,...

At this point, 38,6% of the people who voted in this thread perceive the dress as White with gold stripes. That’s far from a negligible minority and suggests this could go well beyond colour blindness or uncalibrated displays, IMO.

And while environment will indeed influence the perception of colours, what really confuses me is that the referred gold and white colors are "somehow" present in the immediate neighbourhood of the dress (hot spot and gradient on the floor). Now if the dress is indeed perceived white and gold, what value/colour do you attribute to the surrounding?

 

[R5]

Saw it as white and gold this morning and black and blue later on.

Is there a reason for this change or something?

(Note: same display at same brightness)

 

[CinnamonOD]

I did the color test

Didn't get right in the green-ish blue range

And I think my screen is calibrated, because everyone in my family but me can see white and gold.

 

[KSaiyu]

I think this whole fiasco proves science, or at least curiosity is well and truly alive in the world.

 

[F1GTR]

This “buzz” or whatever you may call it is far from stupid/pointless from my perspective. Color fidelity is part of my work. I’ve been shooting (GretagMacbeth) X-Rite’s ColorCheckers for quite some time now, spend countless hours trying to manage multiple visual chains (print/video/film), fine tune 8/16/32 bit pictures with almost infinitesimal control, analyze samples with spectrophotometers, vector-scopes,...

At this point, 38,6% of the people who voted in this thread perceive the dress as White with gold stripes. That’s far from a negligible minority and suggests this could go well beyond colour blindness or uncalibrated displays, IMO.

And while environment will indeed influence the perception of colours, what really confuses me is that the referred gold and white colors are "somehow" present in the immediate neighbourhood of the dress (hot spot and gradient on the floor). Now if the dress is indeed perceived white and gold, what value/colour do you attribute to the surrounding?

It does make you wonder what the point is in dropping thousands for a colour managed workflow when a sizeable proportion of people will be seeing something very different! Heck, even getting something 'close enough' with a cheap calibrator would be fine for 90% of viewing.

 

[Wolfe]

How are people to say what colour the physical object is from a photograph where the colours are not the same?

By accounting for the overexposed yellowish lighting? There was no confusion in my mind what color the physical object is. My wife said, "come over here and tell me what the colors of this dress are." She didn't give me choices. I immediately said, "blue and black." The "black" in the image obviously isn't black, but it was apparent to me that the dress itself had black material. As for the blue part of the image...

...Do you see royal blue in the image, or just bits that are bluish?

And yet the blue value (188) and the saturation (29%) is low. The hue value of 226 is indeed blue (blue peaks at 240), but the low saturation and high brightness pushes it toward the brighter and whiter end. The indicator is well to the left of and above the centre.

Compare to a point sample of the promotional shot. I get 3344d8, with blue at 216 (H at 234 - very blue) and saturation at 76%.

The amount of saturation is enough for me to see a hue very clearly. It's not the same as the actual dress or a better photo of it, but believe me, to my eyes it's still totally blue. The background makes no difference -- I'm not seeing the illusion that @SlipZtrEm posted, which is something I also thought of -- and I've looked at it on multiple displays. My laptop screen is even under-saturated and washed out, which bothers me on GTPlanet (the new color scheme washes out to a solid page of white) and when I'm working with images.

I'm actually fond of low-saturation colors and use them all the time, to paint Forza cars, to customize my Windows Classic theme ("3D Objects" is a blue-tinted gray with saturation 14), to create graphics for the RPG Maker game I'm kicking around, etc. My favorite color is midnight blue with a level of saturation close to what you've plucked from the photo (29%). The blue in the original image Robin. posted on page one is more saturated than some of the colors I like to work with.

I honestly think there's a biological explanation here, and it's fascinating. I wonder if there's a higher incidence of people whose favorite color is blue (like me) among the population that sees blue, possibly because they're more sensitive to it.

 

[Robin]

It does make you wonder what the point is in dropping thousands for a colour managed workflow when a sizeable proportion of people will be seeing something very different! Heck, even getting something 'close enough' with a cheap calibrator would be fine for 90% of viewing.

This is what I was thinking, all those media companies with the most expensive and best calibrated visual equipment work hard to produce something which is going to be accurate to what they want but everyone is seeing something different, especially if it's screen based (even with brightness changes being the only option).

 

[sems4arsenal]

Meanwhile in America

 

[ImaRobot]

By accounting for the overexposed yellowish lighting? There was no confusion in my mind what color the physical object is. My wife said, "come over here and tell me what the colors of this dress are." She didn't give me choices. I immediately said, "blue and black." The "black" in the image obviously isn't black, but it was apparent to me that the dress itself had black material. As for the blue part of the image...

Same situation with me almost to the T, except the roles where reversed.

I honestly think there's a biological explanation here, and it's fascinating. I wonder if there's a higher incidence of people whose favorite color is blue (like me) among the population that sees blue, possibly because they're more sensitive to it.

I'm not so sure. My favorite color happens to be orange, yet I saw blue and black. My other half saw white and off-orange, her favorite color is green.

Meanwhile in America

There seems to be more people out of the U.S talking about it here, though.

 

[FiftyBelowZero]

The actual color is black and blue. People seeing it as white and gold has something to do with the wavelength of the color blue, or something like that.

edit: tree'd

 

[MatskiMonk]

I am colour blind. The dress is ugly.

 

[sems4arsenal]

There seems to be more people out of the U.S talking about it here, though.

True , also weird I din't get an alert for your notification, or I might be as you guys have proven to be color blind.

 

[mr_geez]

 

[MatskiMonk]

Maybe I've been staring at this for too long... I'm just not sure what colour it is.

 

[Legro]

This should be part of the test for becoming a Pilot.

But which one would be pass and which would be not-pass?

 

[Bopop4]

This should be part of the test for becoming a Pilot.

Our aviation class is mainly seeing white and gold.
A few people seeing blue and black, much to our amusement.

 

[Nessy]

When i first saw the pic in this thread (about 10mins ago), it appeared to be an off white/blue grey and a gold/tan/brown. But after seeing the later image of the dress in blue and black (actual color), it appears the original image, comes across more bluish and blackish.. but still the same colour codes that @Famine's plucked from photoshop.

I think it's just the brain making a connection with both images, and auto filling in the gaps, so to speak. It's still not a proper black and blue though.

 

[ImaRobot]

But which one would be pass and which would be not-pass?

The ones not fighting over it.

 

[Wolfe]

@mr_geez -- Wow, my laptop screen doesn't wash out that badly. Looking at mine from a high angle, the screen brightness disappears before the blue ever does.

I'm glad all this has brought people's attention to the terrible lack of consistency in displays, though. Some of my Forza photos look pathetically pale-colored on my laptop (unless I tilt the screen back), and stuff that looks fine on my laptop turns garishly saturated on a TV.

 

[Robin]

So the company which makes the dress is now considering putting a White and Gold one into production...

 

[Keef]

...and stuff that looks fine on my laptop turns garishly saturated on a TV.

They usually do. TVs come from the factory with settings designed to grab your attention in the store. Most of them are a bit over-saturated and over-bright.

 

[ImaRobot]

They usually do. TVs come from the factory with settings designed to grab your attention in the store. Most of them are a bit over-saturated and over-bright.

The settings are usually pretty horrible when it comes to the quality of the picture.

 

[homeforsummer]

By accounting for the overexposed yellowish lighting? There was no confusion in my mind what color the physical object is. My wife said, "come over here and tell me what the colors of this dress are." She didn't give me choices. I immediately said, "blue and black." The "black" in the image obviously isn't black, but it was apparent to me that the dress itself had black material. As for the blue part of the image...

That was pretty much my take. The crappy photo I saw first looked light blue and gold (so I went for 'other' in the poll above) but it was quite apparent the pic was overexposed and the colour balance was way off.

There's a good Vine vid doing the rounds on a different blue/black dress illustrating the effect. Zoomed in, it's blue and black. Zoom out with a yellowy background and the camera freaks out, and the dress looks very light blue and gold.

 

[eight6er]

I'm now seeing it as black and blue on the same screen with nothing changed, except now I've got no day light in the room. That's really weird.

 

[fortbo]

I've been seeing it as white and gold this entire time!

 

[homeforsummer]

In other news, I love the new gold and white colour combo on the BMW i8:

...totally stole that off Facebook.

 

[Wolfe]

They usually do. TVs come from the factory with settings designed to grab your attention in the store. Most of them are a bit over-saturated and over-bright.

The specific instance I was thinking of was on someone else's HDTV via the HDMI output, so they were probably factory settings, yes. But I know the colors on my laptop are under-saturated. Now this has spurred me to up the saturation on my GPU settings; I actually wasn't aware my laptop supported that.

 

[fortbo]

Just copped some blue and black Jordans!