heywood on 20/4/2015 at 12:12
Quote Posted by Muzman
...and the next thing that happens in these arguments is people start saying, in effect, that even though they were wrong they were right. Or that they were more right to be wrong. That their wrongness was closer to right, or more conducive to rightness in most situations. It's the right that were actually wrong, because their rightness was arrived at by a fluke, or error or crazy eyeballs. Wrongness just makes the most sense! Wrong is reasonable.
Which is great, I love it.
So anyway, a fun thing to do is remove the colour information and then look at it
Inline Image:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ragtag/dress1bw.jpgIt may or may not make any difference, I suppose. But it should make it more apparent that the lighter of the two materials is in no way close to white and barely rises out of the midtones of the image.
More interesting still is to pay attention to the
other white highlighted dress behind it.
Inline Image:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~ragtag/dress1crop.jpgIf you look at the black part of that material and check the values for the lighter and more illuminated parts of the folds, the values you get are between 25% and over 45%, or about 64 to 115 out of 255 with a rough typical value of 76 or 30% (not scientifically attained, just the value the colour picker seemed to find the most)
If you look at the black or 'gold' part of the dress we all love to hate, you get values of around 20% to 45% or 51 to 115 out of 255. The typical value is also about 30-33% or about 76-84 on a 255 scale. The brightest part at the top, where most people seem to get their gold impression from, is only 45%/115 at the most.
Now looking at the white part of the other dress, behind the main one. As deep as the image resolution will allow in the folds there, the white part is 75%/191. In the main it is over 95%/242.
Now that, folks, is white.
The blue/'white part of the controversy dress is typically around 55-60% or 140-153. At its tippy top highlight up on those shoulder folds you get 83%/212. Far above the average for that material in the image and nowhere close to the other white, on average.
So we have two black materials which, when illuminated, report roughly similar tonal values, as expected, even though one looks gold to some. And two purportedly white materials which are wildly different.
But, they say, why measure the high point of the other black against the darker material of the main dress?
Because that's what's happening here. At first glance I read that the main dress is quite well front/top lit (and the whole image is probably brightened again after the fact). It's not particularly bright lighting compared to the exterior, but nothing can compete with that. That interior lighting, coupled with a shiny material and some post brightening are going to give you quite a high average for that sort of black material. And moreover, they would give you very obvious highlight whites, as the other dress shows. Ergo, it is not white. It is, as it appears, blue. (and one would guess quite a dark blue, under true-er conditions. Which the real thing bears out).
I don't know the conditions of the original photo, but I think there are two light sources, a camera flash and the room lighting. I think most of us are not conditioned to interpret images with two light sources of different color temperature, so we pick one as the reference. I think the people who naturally see blue/black are unconsciously keying on the flash, and the people who naturally see white/gold are unconsciously using the room lighting. In the blue/black interpretation, the scene is brightly lit by a camera flash or other very bright light source behind the camera. In the white/gold interpretation, the scene is dimly lit, the dominant light source is in front of the dress and we're looking at the back of the dress which is in the shade.
What's interesting is that I can't see white/gold in the original image, but I can interpret it that way in the greyscale version. It's like the whole image changes once you remove the color temperature reference. In the greyscale version, it looks like there is a bright light source in the room in front of the dress, and the backside of the dress is in the shade. It's much harder for me to see it as a flash photo without color.
downwinder on 21/4/2015 at 22:24
i loaded page dress was white and gold,then after i scroll down and back up it turned blue and black,i am out of this board
Slasher on 22/4/2015 at 00:56
there is no dress
demagogue on 22/4/2015 at 08:42
My friend has synesthesia and says the color of the dress is a mute trumpet. =I
faetal on 22/4/2015 at 08:55
Bullshit, it's a French horn!
Tony_Tarantula on 29/4/2015 at 03:04
I've noticed an interesting effect on my end. I see thumbnails or zoomed out images of it as white and gold, but the full size image is crystal clear black and blue.
Muzman on 11/5/2015 at 11:39
Quote Posted by demagogue
I read a cogsci article on color perception that was looking at classic art where artists used white paint for clearly black objects, like (
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Gustave_Caillebotte_-_The_Floor_Planers_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) floor1 (bottom center bit), (
http://www.thefamousartists.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/The-Washer-Women-v1.jpg) floor2, and (
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a01fyDMDwAM/TcqyVIqL0-I/AAAAAAAAAAk/xtG_p7Ew4Bg/s1600/another%2B%2Bboo.png) floor3. Josef Albers is associated with modern art theory of it.
The cogsci article said shadow and 'base color'get proccessed in parallel, so that we can't see the white paint as white, but black. Even when the floor1 black strip is next to a 'darker' peeled stripe, we can still tell the black part in white paint is darker. The process here is probably then whether the black in the dress gets put on that 'shadow coloring' track or not. If it does, it'll get processed black, if not then you get the white. Edit: Sorry, vice versa of this. It's not 'shadow coloring', it's 'lighted coloring', so if it's on that track the off-white appears black, and if not the off-white looks white.
Here's my first theory I'll leave for completeness sake--
There's probably multiple things going on at multiple levels. I remember from cogsci the effect of illusory shading to accentuate boundaries, or part of it, happens very low level in the ganglions just behind the retina already. But for things that 'pop' in or out, like the rabbit-duck family of illusions, there's an interpretation of the overall context or situation that puts a feature down one perceptual track or another, and fills out the details accordingly. That's why they call perception heterachical, because it's top down (context directs features) and bottom up (features direct context) at the same time.
Hooray, some spare time/will.
I might be missing the cogsci point in there, but a lot of that stuff is discussed in art class. Perhaps from a different direction to the subject, I'm not sure.
If you're doing proper light rendering, pretty early on they point out things like any given surface at the proper angle to the viewer and the light source will become almost completely reflective. What determines when this is is the texture. Optimal brightness of a flat surface is 90 degrees between the light source and the view point. But you can get real shine out of even rough surfaces at wider angles when the formerly diffusing details all converge into one.
An example of this is in movies when you see a camera moving through a space and you see light fittings pass by and as they pass out of frame there's a flare across the image. This is a hard reflection off the lens hood of the camera. A piece of equipment that is made matte black and thin to minimise this and often coated in a felt or other fuzzy material. Yet at the right angle it'll still happen.
Anyway, the lesson they're giving there is basically that humans are very good in certain ways at discerning space and materials from light like that. To trick our eyes you have to be very knowledgeable and particular in how you do it. If you don't know what material you're drawing and how it'll behave at that angle to light (and how to achieve that effect in the chosen medium) your picture won't be as naturalistic as one that does. Assuming technical naturalism as the goal here, of course.
It's startlingly precise too. A shadow or secondary light value that's just a little too bright or too dark won't work. A surface that's reflecting when it shouldn't will throw off the whole rendering. A surface that's not reflecting when it should will make a scene 'dead'. etc etc.
That might be the point; our recognition of a given surface colour is calculated and named in context. The black shiny floor is black, not the myriad of colours it is reflecting at various angles according to how worn it is.
Breaking that sort of connotation down is often step one in drawing class and things like why kids draw stick figures instead of what they see. It's not just motor control. It's abstract thinking too. You point to clouds in a blue sky and say what colour are they? White is the usual answer. But they're actually blue. In context they are white etc etc.
I don't know where I am with regards to the point actually. So we'll see.
I do find getting white out of that blue the hardest part for me to understand. Even with the 'in shadow' theory, I don't think I've ever seen anything white go
that blue in any context. I jump to some idea about reading the rest as gold first and the cortex does its thing to recalibrate the rest of the picture accordingly; The gold is dark and out of the light so the blue is white in that situation.
But I'm fishing desperately. And the rest of the picture!...
There's other things that spring to mind like human's being weird when it comes to blue. Language and other things having a significant effect on where people discern the boundary between blue and green (including whether they can tell the difference at all).
And that almost What the $%$^ do we know kind of story that humans didn't even know what blue was for a while and there's no word for it in ancient western civilisations and so on.
It's going to show up in a Neal Stephenson book all this.
demagogue on 12/5/2015 at 01:41
The thing with blue and green I've gotten used to living in Japan, at least how Japanese use 'blue', aoi, to refer to both, like the traffic lights turning 'blue' when they're clearly green. But of course Japanese color vision is the same. It's just certain colors get labeled by convention. The sun is also always 'red' in Japan too, even when it's noon ... because it's the right answer.
It made an impression on me about the power of convention. But this dress is a whole other ballgame, since it's not just convention, but something hinky going on neurologically.
Queue on 13/5/2015 at 03:46
The only dress I care about is the one with Bill Clinton's jizz on it. I'll give five (count em, five) whole dollars for that sucker.
Why are we talking about a dress? My God, what happened to this place while I was gone? Someone changed the curtains!
