Most likely, you have already seen this dress, and you probably have your own opinion about its color. But the whole world still cannot come to a clear opinion. For some it is invariably blue-black, for others it is white and gold and nothing else!
There were even cases when a person at first thought that the dress was the same color, and then after some time he was sure of the opposite!
This dress has already caused too much trouble. It's time to face the truth and find out what color it really is.
That same photo of the dress that caused so much controversy:
According to some, original dress, if the lighting were better, it should look like this:
Others believe that if it weren’t for the excessive light, the dress would have looked like this:
But why do people see different colors in the same photo? There is one version about this, and it has nothing to do with the monitor settings, nothing depends on them, we checked.
It's all about how the eyes of each individual person react to an illuminated object. Some people decide that the dress is not lit enough (or that its surface is highly reflective) and their brain signals their eyes to compensate. Hence the white-gold color. Others think the dress has too much light falling on it (or the surface is less reflective) and their eyes tell them it is blue-black.
Everything is like in the famous optical illusion Adelson. In the picture, square "A" is the same color as square "B", although it seems that this is not the case.
In general, it turns out that a person’s eyes see an image the way the brain perceives it. Past experience is also important. If a person has seen a fabric with a similar texture or a similar dress in a certain color, this will likely influence what color they see in the photo of the dress. Scientists still know little about this phenomenon called “perception difference.”
And here is a photo of the real dress. It still turned out to be blue-black.
The start of the “viral debate” was given by a publication on the Tumblr website: the owner of the dress decided to ask Internet users for opinions about its color after she discovered similar disagreements among her loved ones. The answers turned out to be diametrically opposite: from blue and black to white and gold. At the same time, it is difficult for someone who sees the outfit as dark to believe that the “opponent” is not joking and actually sees the clothes shown in the photo as light (and vice versa).
A photograph with a corresponding question immediately flew around the virtual space. Even the stars gave their version of color perception: for example, Kim Kardashian saw a white and gold version, Lady Gaga spoke in favor of blue and sand, and Taylor Swift is sure that the dress has blue and black colors.
In just the first day of publication on one of the sites, BuzzFeed, the photo received 28 million views. It is now known for sure that the dress is made in dark colors(this was shown both by analysis of the photograph using professional photographic tools and by the confession of the owner of the “controversial clothing”), however, those who see the dress as light-colored still find it difficult to believe it. Scientists have explained the reason for this optical illusion.
The system of color perception was developed in humans during the process of evolution. We have developed daytime vision, in which we distinguish all elements of the surrounding world, including color. Light enters the eye through the lens, hitting the retina at the back of the eye. Waves different lengths differently activate neural connections in the visual cortex, which translates signals into images.
Night vision allows us to see the outlines and movement of objects, but their color range is lost. However, even in daylight, color perception is not always unambiguous: in different lighting conditions, the color scheme of an object is perceived differently, and the brain also takes this into account. The same color may appear pink-red to us at dawn, white-blue during the day, and red at sunset. The brain makes a decision about the “reality” of color, in each case making allowances for related factors.
This is what explains the difference in perception of the same image different people. Those who mistake the light in the background for sunlight assume that the dress is in shadow, so its light areas are obviously blue. Some people, in the same bright light, are more accustomed to seeing the whiteness of the dress. This is the most common version. However, the brain of about 30% of people does not take into account the light in the background at all - in which case the dress appears blue to it, and the gold fragments then “become” black.
Each person has his own visual experience, his own level of concentration, his own specific eye movements. The level of lighting in your own environment, the color scheme of objects that the brain recorded before switching attention - all this taken together makes a difference in perception.
Scientists have known this factor for a long time. But fundamental scientific knowledge itself does not attract such wide public attention: this became possible only during the period of widespread development of the Internet in combination with interesting topic for discussion. Washington State University neuroscientist Jay Neitz told Wired.com that he has been studying individual differences in color perception for 30 years. According to him, the current example is the most revealing in all the years of his research. By the way, Neitz himself sees the dress as white and gold.
A few days ago, the Internet was blown up by a photo of a dress. This story had already passed me by, but today at work they still showed me a picture:
I still don’t understand how you can see anything here other than a blue-black dress? :)
Roman Women's Lace Detail Bodycon Dress Royal Blue
When I returned home, I showed the photo to my five-year-old daughter, then to my wife. They independently named the dress white and gold. Moreover, the Photoshop check did not convince them to look at the dress in a new way. Which led to this thorough investigation.
Objects in life shimmer in different shades depending on their surface (glossy, matte) and lighting. For example, snow is usually not white, but with a blue tint. Believing that the object in the photo is not illuminated by pure white light (for example, orange light from a fire), the brain tries to ignore this color shift. The brain doesn’t want to leave its comfort zone and assume that snow can be different colors. It is much more common to “see” snow as white. Each person's color correction process is unique, hence the controversy over the color of the dress.
To understand that color perception is not so simple, here's a trick: look closely at the center of the first picture, then click on it, and the second picture will momentarily appear in color.
The first picture is a negative (a picture with reverse colors). When the images suddenly switch, compensation continues in the brain, and shades of gray are colored in the desired colors. What exactly is going on in your head? Perhaps this is akin to addiction, and this is not only inherent in visual perception. For example, the second candy no longer seems as sweet as the first.
So, the brain comes up with colors based on its own experience and the environment. To figure out the conditions for photographing a dress, the brain needs to cling to something familiar and understandable.
It's like a photographer looking for areas in a photo that should be pure gray in order to compensate for the shooting conditions and bring the colors closer to the real ones ("white balance").
There are several characteristic areas in our photo that indicate bright yellow lighting (or an incorrect shooting mode, which is identical to bright yellow lighting).
In addition, the main color of the dress is similar to blue, passed through a warm (that is, yellow) filter. Of course, to see this for sure, you need experience. Let's check this version: take a photo of a really blue-black dress from Google, put a beige filter on top of it. And finally, we put the same dress (cut out along the contour) over the photo. The blue and black colors, both in light and dark areas, matched down to the millimeter. Let me emphasize what exactly same conversion turned blue and black into what we need:
Here's another photo to check that I didn't change anything:
I hope that after this picture your doubts about the real color of the dress have disappeared, and what remains is knowledge about the nuances of color perception. By the way, the saturation of blue on that same dress is 20-30%. For comparison, on a snow-white, non-glossy dress in daylight, the blue saturation is within 5%, unless you are next to a large blue building. 20% is “confident” blue, this is the color used in the site header in this post.
In the soft evening light snow white dress the bride can specifically go into the blue, but:
1) together with white, all colors will turn blue, including red, yellow, and “gold”, but this did not happen in the original photo (all these colors are present in the photo in an undistorted form);
2) the original photo was clearly taken not in the evening, but in the light of the sun (or indoors under identical conditions); the light falls from above, this is evidenced by the clear shadows from the cape and from the relief stripes of the dress.
To be fair, let's check this version in Photoshop: Google White dress, and apply a cool blue filter. Let's imagine that the dress was photographed on the beach, late in the evening, when the sun had already set. Although this contradicts the original photo with very bright light yellow highlights. So the "white" color does match, but let's take a closer look at what's going on with the other colors:
Evening lighting from the sky is uniform, the shadows from such lighting are blurry and barely visible, and the photo is dark over the entire surface. These properties are clearly not inherent in the original photo.
Gold shimmers from light yellow to dark brown. The stripes on the dress (out of context) may be golden, but they lack the characteristic shine:
The fabric has smoother tints and noticeable roughness. This is what we see in the original photograph upon closer examination. Left - black leather bag and a black plaid, on the right is a dress.
The play of light and shadows is very similar, isn't it? Gold details are present on the bag, for comparison.
P.S. I can make myself see and white and gold dress in a picture where it is cut out and pasted onto a dark background, and if you look with peripheral vision and move the photo up and down so that the brain does not have time to orient itself. And in the original photo, no matter how you look at it, I still see blue dress with black openwork stripes and a blue shiny cape.
P.P.S. And a couple more photos to troll and confuse :)
Related video:
Users all over the Internet are still arguing about what color the dress is - blue or white. This mystery also interested ophthalmologists, who tried to provide an explanation.
People see differently because lighting is important, it creates the combination of how much light falls on an object and how much is reflected from it. Some people see that the dress is blue because they think the lighting is strong, others see more reflected light and therefore for them the dress is white and gold.
Humanity is accustomed to the fact that the real colors of objects are visible in daylight. However, this light can also change colors - at dawn, dusk and during the day they are completely different. The visual system does not take this into account, so those who look at the dress either do not perceive Blue colour, and see white or gold, or ignore gold, and then the dress is blue and black. That is, the whole point is whether the person took into account the background: if he thinks that the picture was taken against the sun, then the dress, logically, is in the shadow, and therefore the light areas are bluish.
Discussion about the strange dress began after its photo appeared first on Tumblr and then on BuzzFeed. The photo was posted by Caitlin McNeil. The mother of the bride bought the dress and sent a photo to her daughter to show her hers. wedding dress. First, the bride and groom began arguing, then other acquaintances began arguing. Then Caitlin McNeil decided to show the dress on the Internet and find out what users thought about it.
Let us remember that Julianne Moore, Kim Kardashian saw the dress in white and gold, and Taylor Swift, James Franco, Kanye West, Justin Bibber - in black and blue.
What color do you see?
The question that worries scientists and philosophers is: do we really see the world differently? For example, do two healthy people have the same color perception, or will red be unequally red for each, and blue will have different saturation for different viewers? International group researchers studied the characteristics of color perception of people from different countries.
An international group of researchers studied the color perception of people from different countries. It turns out that regardless of origin and cultural characteristics, we see colors approximately the same. Moreover, the names of colors in human languages appeared in accordance with their intensity - that is, the order in which they are perceived by visual receptors.
The experiment, conducted by Italian and Indian researchers, resembled a guessing game. Two volunteers communicated virtually. One of them was shown several objects of the same color, and he had to explain to the second what shade he saw - of course, without naming it. To describe the color, the experiment participant chose a substitute word. According to scientists, despite cultural differences, the second participant in most cases quickly guessed what color was meant. The experiment lasted until both participants came to a “consensus” on the name of a particular color.
The scientists were also able to determine which colors were easiest for the volunteers to describe. In first place was, as you might guess, red. Next came purple-red, violet, green-yellow, blue, orange and cyan. It is curious that this sequence roughly corresponds to the order in which the names of colors appeared in a particular culture and, accordingly, language. The most “ancient” colors, the designations of which appeared in human speech, are considered to be white, black and red.
“For example, if there was a common designation for the color red in a population, there was likely a designation for both white and black,” says Francesca Tria, a physiologist in Turin, Italy, and co-author of the study. If the language already had a name for green, then it certainly had a word for red, she adds.
In human development, the moment when a child begins to perceive colors is the most important stage in the formation of the psyche. Child psychologists and physiologists believe that color is one of the first signs by which a child recognizes certain objects. Young children are usually drawn to bright colors. At first they operate with a very limited palette, which expands as they grow older. Children's color preferences change with age. Until the age of ten, most of them say their favorite colors are red (or pink) and yellow.
After ten, many people begin to prefer blue or green. With normal development, by the age of four or five, children are already able to distinguish and name colors, but only by the age of five or six do they develop the perception of color as an unchanging feature. It is curious that until the age of eight to ten they retain a tendency to draw objects in the colors they like, regardless of the actual shade of the depicted objects (multi-colored flower stems, pink sky, blue sun, etc.).
The basic “color series” (the order in which color names appear) observed in cultural and linguistic studies remains unchanged. Apparently, the whole point is that it coincides with the physiological sensitivity of the human eye: our receptors see red better than blue. And in the process of language formation, man first of all gave names to vitally important phenomena. Since red is the color of blood and fire, it is not surprising that the word for it appeared earlier than for others.
True, there are still some cross-cultural differences. For example, the languages of "primitive" agricultural peoples have many words for shades of green - out of the need to control the growth and maturation of plants and estimate the size of future harvests. The concept of "basic" colors in different cultures was also different.
In the Ancient East there were five of them, in medieval Europe - only three (at first - red, yellow and blue, later - red, green and blue). Artists recognize red, blue and yellow as the primary colors, and consider the rest to be products of their mixing. Achromatic colors (white and black) are considered analogues of absolute illumination (white is sunlight not divided along the spectrum) and absolute darkness (black).
The meanings of white and black in culture generally differ the most - apparently because these colors are difficult to find in nature in their pure form. U different nations they had rather a symbolic meaning. In European culture, black symbolized the negative aspects of life: it is the color of mourning, the color of dark forces, black magic. A black cat (less often a dog, but also certainly black) in the Middle Ages was considered an attribute of a witch.
In Eastern cultures, black has a completely different meaning. In Japan, it is a symbol of nobility, age and experience; it is not without reason that the black belt is a sign of the highest skill in martial arts. In Turkic history and toponymy, “black” (kara) also meant “big”, “great”: the Karakhanid Empire - “great khans”, Kara-Kum - “great sands”, that is, “Great Desert”.
Today, almost the whole world is asking the question: what color is this dress? Some people see it as white and gold, and some as black and blue. And no, this is not a trick on the sites, this is the same photo (my colleague and I looked at the monitor and saw different colors).
Let's try to explain why we all see dresses of different colors.
No, it is not related to any cells in your eyes.
It's about how your brain interprets the light entering your eyes.
"We always make decisions about the amount of light that enters the retina of our eyes. This light, called brightness, is always a combination of how much light hits an object and how the light is reflected on the surface of the object," says the psychology professor Kedar Riner.
In the case of a dress, some people believe that the dress gets a large number of light and therefore it appears to them as black and blue (if not in such harsh colors, then significantly dark). And other people, deciding that a little light gets on the dress, see it as white and gold, Day.Az reports with reference to BuzzFeed.
The same trick happens with Adelson's famous chessboard shadow illusion.
Let's check. Look at the picture below, square A is exactly the same color as the squareB, but they look completely different.
Okay, but why do different people's brains interpret light differently?
Our vision largely depends on the so-called “top-down” processing - a consistent transition from general perception (recognition) of the whole to highlighting its individual details in perception. Top-down processing starts from our brain and flows down, filtering information through our experiences and expectations. That's why we all see a different color dress.
Also, what you were looking at before you looked at the dress can influence your perception.
Another guess: Because people are active during the day, they perceive daylight most often. It can range from pinkish-red to blue-white and reddish. “This will happen if the visual system sees an object and tries to ignore the chromatic bias of daylight,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College. “So people will either ignore bluish and see a white and gold dress, or yellowish and see black and blue.” dress". He is probably referring to the current lighting around the person.
Most likely, you have already seen this dress, and you probably have your own opinion about its color. But the whole world still cannot come to a clear opinion. For some it is invariably blue-black, for others it is white and gold and nothing else!
There were even cases when a person at first thought that the dress was the same color, and then after some time he was sure of the opposite!
This dress has already caused too much trouble. It's time to face the truth and find out what color it really is.
That same photo of the dress that caused so much controversy:
According to some, the original dress, if the lighting were better, should look like this:
Others believe that if it weren’t for the excessive light, the dress would have looked like this:
But why do people see different colors in the same photo? There is one version about this, and it has nothing to do with the monitor settings, nothing depends on them, we checked.
It's all about how the eyes of each individual person react to an illuminated object. Some people decide that the dress is not lit enough (or that its surface is highly reflective) and their brain signals their eyes to compensate. Hence the white-gold color. Others think the dress has too much light falling on it (or the surface is less reflective) and their eyes tell them it is blue-black.
Everything is like in the famous Adelson optical illusion. In the picture, square "A" is the same color as square "B", although it seems that this is not the case.
In general, it turns out that a person’s eyes see an image the way the brain perceives it. Past experience is also important. If a person has seen a fabric with a similar texture or a similar dress in a certain color, this will likely influence what color they see in the photo of the dress. Scientists still know little about this phenomenon called “perception difference.”
And here is a photo of the real dress. It still turned out to be blue-black.
Have you ever enthusiastically argued with your loved one about what color the blouse or shirt you are wearing actually is? Have you ever been surprised to hear that something you sincerely thought was green was perceived by someone else as blue?
Color recognition is a subtle thing, we all have our own characteristics that affect how our brain interprets visual information. The correct answer to the question "blue or green" in in this case no, because different people can perceive the same shade of color differently.
In order to avoid discrepancies, there is a system for coding color shades (RGB model). From a technical point of view, each color is a mixture of three tones - red, green and blue (red, green, blue), and the final shade depends on which of the tones is present in what quantity in the shade. However, the human brain sometimes interprets this mix very freely, and this is associated with the difference in the perception of the same shade by different people.
An experiment conducted by Optical Express scientists very clearly showed this difference. What color do you think this square is - blue or green? Well, or this way: this color is for you personally rather blue than green, or vice versa?
The results of the experiment showed the ambiguity in the perception of shades by different people. Scientists presented this image to non-colorblind participants (1,000 people took part in the survey) and asked them to answer the question “what color is this rectangle?” For 32% of respondents this color is blue, for 64% it is green, and 4% could not decide. Here's how scientists themselves explain this difference of opinion:
Each person is unique, and many different factors can influence the perception of color shade. The light beam penetrates the eyeball and reaches the retina, the light-sensitive tissue that lines the bottom of the eyeball. Next comes the process of interpretation, when the light is transformed into an electrical signal, which is transmitted along the optic nerve to the cortex, the part of the brain responsible for processing the information received. How exactly the brain interprets a color shade can be influenced not only by physiological characteristics, but also by a person’s psycho-emotional state. In particular, people experiencing stress are less sensitive to green shades, and among them there are much more of those who called the specified shade of color blue.
Green. From a technical point of view, the model of this color is described as RGB 0.122.116 (green tones - 122, blue - 116, red - zero). After the participants in the experiment named the color, the scientists placed two more images on both sides of the picture, a pronounced green one and a pronounced green one. blue color, after which they were again asked to answer the question “what color is this rectangle?” Having clear color references, 97% of the experiment participants called the original rectangle green.
Well, if you do see this color as blue, then think about it - maybe it’s just time for you to take a vacation!
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