am I part of the joke here??? It’s clearly blue and black…
The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.
But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.
If anything, I’m more interested in how THAT color is being interpreted than the dress itself. Does it become shade to people because they perceive it relative to the dress? Because, I mean, we know that it is factually light. So how are people perceiving it to be the absence of light? Can you explain that bit?
The brain doesn’t just read raw brightness; it interprets that brightness in relation to what it thinks is going on in the scene.
So when someone sees the dress as white and gold, they’re usually assuming the scene is lit by cool, natural light — like sunlight or shade. That makes the brain treat the lighter areas as a white-ish or light blue material under shadow. The darker areas (what you see as black) become gold or brown, because the brain thinks it’s seeing lighter fabric catching less light.
You, on the other hand, are likely interpreting the lighting as warm and direct — maybe indoor, overexposed lighting. So your brain treats the pale pixels not as light-colored fabric, but as light reflecting off a darker blue surface. The same with the black: it’s being “lightened” by the glare which changes the pixel representation to gold, but you interpret it as black under strong light, not gold.
You can literally sample the rgb values and see it’s blue and black
Edit: am I part of the joke here??? It’s clearly blue and black…
The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.
But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.
Optical illusion innit
If anything, I’m more interested in how THAT color is being interpreted than the dress itself. Does it become shade to people because they perceive it relative to the dress? Because, I mean, we know that it is factually light. So how are people perceiving it to be the absence of light? Can you explain that bit?
The brain doesn’t just read raw brightness; it interprets that brightness in relation to what it thinks is going on in the scene.
So when someone sees the dress as white and gold, they’re usually assuming the scene is lit by cool, natural light — like sunlight or shade. That makes the brain treat the lighter areas as a white-ish or light blue material under shadow. The darker areas (what you see as black) become gold or brown, because the brain thinks it’s seeing lighter fabric catching less light.
You, on the other hand, are likely interpreting the lighting as warm and direct — maybe indoor, overexposed lighting. So your brain treats the pale pixels not as light-colored fabric, but as light reflecting off a darker blue surface. The same with the black: it’s being “lightened” by the glare which changes the pixel representation to gold, but you interpret it as black under strong light, not gold.