Gold or Blue? What’s the Hue? #TheDress

Karen Braun, color scientist for PARC, A Xerox Company

Color is subjective, as the Internet has proven again this week with the well-publicized ruckus over a simple dress.

Our visual systems are all different, including the number and arrangement of rods and cones in our retinas, the yellowing of our lens with age, and the complicated wiring in the brain.

Color deficiency, or color blindness, affects almost 10 percent of the male population in the U.S., and about one percent of females. Most of those people can still perceive color, but with less variation from the rest of the population, and the colors look different.

That said, the dress is blue and black. Here’s proof.

 

Roman2

This is the home page of the seller, obviously enjoying a little free publicity.

Using Adobe Photoshop’s AutoLevels tells us that:

BothDresses

 

The black has a gold appearance for two reasons. First the image is over-exposed. The histograms below show the number of pixels that have each color level of red, green, and blue:

Red

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see that there are no pixels with low values of red and green values (on the left of the chart). This can happen when the lighting is unnatural, as it probably was in the store where the dress was photographed. Photoshop corrects this when one chooses AutoLevels, as in the right-hand image above.

The second reason is that the black material is shiny and therefore reflecting some of the warm light of the store.

The dress does not look white to me, especially considering the white and black dresses showing in the lower left of the picture. Perhaps the explanation for why some people see it this way, besides the aforementioned differences in human vision, is that a wide range of colors can look neutral depending on context and surrounding colors. We tend to judge the colors of everything we see, based on what we perceive as white — usually the color of the lighting.

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7 Comments

  1. Jerome February 28, 2015 -

    So what are you suggesting? I see the darker shade dress. Am I correct

  2. Karen Braun March 2, 2015 -

    Yes, you are “correct” (because the dress actually IS black and blue) but the visual system is tricky business, and so those who see it as white and gold aren’t really wrong either. Vision is truly subjective. Color is a combination of the object, the lighting, the eye, and brain. We can say that an apple is objectively “red” based on the spectrum of colors that it reflects, but under certain lighting or to someone with a color deficiency for example, the apple will look much different than it does to you under normal lighting.

  3. Jason DeTrempe March 2, 2015 -

    I see gold/white each time I look at this picture. Most of my friends see black/blue. A few people told me they saw gold/white at first but then hours later they saw black/blue… one friend asked me if I switched the (printed) picture when she saw it later.

  4. Karen March 3, 2015 -

    Ellen Degeneres weighs in: “It turns out the real dress is blue and black. Isn’t that amazing? It’s amazing. The real dress is wrong.”

  5. […] ver el análisis de Karen Braun aquí, junto con los histogramas de Photoshop. Ya resuelto el misterio, el vestido sigue dando de qué […]

  6. john March 9, 2015 -

    I’m somewhat disappointed here, I’d have thought that this would be the one place calling the shade its proper name: Xerox Blue, so named because that particular shade of blue would oversaturate copiers’ imaging system and not get copied

    • Karen March 12, 2015 -

      Thanks for your comment! Rest assured, Xerox printers are capable of printing our logo, as well as “the dress” in blue and black, or white and gold. The color quality of all our devices is better than ever.

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