Why not an American photo editor?

This is exactly the thing.

Whatever the dress may be in reality, the photo of it that was circulated was either exposed or twiddled with such that the pixels it’s made of are indeed slightly bluish grey trending towards white (i.e. above 50% grey) and tanish browny gold.

That is absolutely not up for debate. Those are the color values of those pixels, end of discussion.

Edit to add: This entire debacle is a fascinating case of people either failing to or refusing to separate the concept of a physical object versus its very inaccurate representation. The photograph of the object is not the object: ce n’est pas une robe.

The people going around in this thread and elsewhere putting people down and calling them “stupid” or whatever else only because they know that the physical dress itself is black and blue based on external information are studiously ignoring the fact that this is not what the photograph of it shows. That’s because the photograph is extremely cooked and is not an accurate depiction. The debate only exists at all if one party or the other does not have the complete set of information, and at this point in history now that this stupid meme has been driven into the ground quite thoroughly I should hope that all of us do.

It’s true that our brains can and will interpret false color data based on either context or surrounding contrast, and it’s possible that somebody deliberately messed with the original image to amplify this effect in the first place. But the fact remains that arguing about what the dress is versus how it’s been inaccurately depicted is stupid, and anyone still trying that at this late stage is probably doing so in bad faith.

The point has never been about the actual pixel color codes. It’s about how human perception doesn’t follow those objective metrics.

Distilled down, we perceive color and brightness in comparison to the surrounding scene. The checker shadow illusion is a clear example of the same color looking different.

So the color perception on the dress depends on how the brain decides to color correct the white balance of the scene.

When you look at the checker shadow illusion, do you see the pixels as identical in color? If not, then obviously there’s more to human perception than just the color of the pixel code.

I see white/gold too, and this always fascinated me because I’m wrong. The real dress is black/blue. It’s very hard for me to perceive that way, partly due to the bad quality picture, and particularly the background lighting.

The gold is black and the white is a dark blue irl, but in the bad coloring/lighting of the picture, the deep blue is quite washed out. Know that the colors are very washed out, know that the “gold” is black. Focus on the lower left where the colors are closest to true and block out the rest, especially the bright parts. The thick black stripe in the middle can also be a good spot to start to see it.

Funny, I see black and blue, of course the “black” part looks like gold but I think it’s because of the lighting and the actual color is dark gray

Yeah, and then people started posting comparison shots of what both groups of people see, side by side. One dress clearly being blue/black, and the other being clearly white/gold.

I just remember thinking to myself how people can look at that and still believe in nonsense. If there really was something going on with the colors, light wavelength, etc. we’d just be looking at a side-by-side image of two identical dresses, like looking at a stereoscopic image.

You never understood it because you are wrong. If you actually *color pick you will see that it is blue and black. Not only are you eyes/brain incorrect, but the original dress is actually blue and black.

This isn’t the picture they used at the time either, why are we cropping it now?

This dress is black and blue. I am laughing hysterically that any of you think it’s not. Is your eyesight bad in other ways? Honestly asking because mine is really good.

How does it feel to be objectively wrong?

We don’t need dress. We have beans.

Crazy talk. White and gold only

The photo looks different. I see the original as white and gold but this looks blue and black

if you take a digital photo of the [ … thing … ] and post it on the internet as a terribly compressed jpg

That sums up the entirety of the content on a number of popular subs on the R-word site.

Confusing perspective? No. More like confusing JPEG artifacts.

It’s more about the colors around it. This image from Wikipedia does a really good job illustrating the effect.

Context is extremely important in identifying color. As Technology Connections tells us, for example, “brown is just orange with context.”

And what everyone seemed to omit: the reality of peoples’ wildly uncalibrated monitors/phone screens.

Is it, though? Is this dress in the pic only white and gold to everyone who looks at the picture/the original?

Yea i never see an ounce of black on there. That’s fucking yellow.

I see blue stripes or white if standing in a shadow. But there is no black.

Brain defect.