Trending on the internet right now is this low resolution image of a dress. The reason it’s spreading faster than spam is because some people see a blue and black dress and others see a white and gold dress. In order for us to function as a species we depend on a consistent and mutual understanding of the world around us. But if half of us perceive a physical object one way and the other half sees it another way what does this say about our shared reality?
As a digital graphics professional I’ve been very curious why this difference in color perception has been occurring. I believe there are some physical conditions concerning the mechanics of the eye itself that could be behind this phenomenon but I also believe the nature of perception itself is partially responsible for the difference. To see if there was any merit to my idea I decided to deconstruct the image in Photoshop to see what I could learn about this bizarre situation.
The first thing I would like you to assume is that you are not looking at a dress. After all you really just looking at a grid of pixels on a screen. If we take the image apart can we determine the true colors of the dress in the image? Of course we can produce a list of colors for each pixel in the image but that amounts to a list of numbers with no instinctual meaning to our optic nerve. But taking the image appart might change your understanding of what you see.
Because we already know this is a dress in a store I wanted to try removing the dress from its background to prevent the extra information effecting what you believe you ae seeing. I cut the dress out of the image and set the background to 50% gray: the most neutral tone in the spectrum.
Next I used Photoshop’s magic wand tool to isolate the “lighter” areas of the dress from the “darker” areas. Hold a card up to block your view of one of these separated images. Does this change what colors you see? Does it make it easier to decide?
In these examples I simply inverted the colors of each separation like a negative. Notice how the formerly “lighter” image on the left now shares similar hues to the original “darker” image. The same holds true for the formerly “darker” image on the right. That is because these two hues are opposite on the color wheel. Sometimes oppsite colors can alter our ability to see the colors as they might be if they were isolated from one another.
Going back to the non-inverted, separated samples I made a list of 256 colors present in each version. From these palates draw your own conclusions about which colors you are seeing, but notice how the “lighter” version has almost as much gray as it does blue and “darker” version has very little black or gold. We might see blue, black, gold, and white but in reality there is very little of any of these colors present.
Going back to the non-inverted, separated samples I made a list of 256 colors present in each version. From these palates draw your own conclusions about which colors you are seeing, but notice how the “lighter” version has almost as much gray as it does blue and “darker” version has very little black or gold. We might see blue, black, gold, and white but in reality there is very little of any of these colors present.
CONCLUSION:
Everything you perceive is defined by both experiences and associations. You cannot perceive grouped objects (like colors) empirically without removing the group from their immediate circumstances. But since you cannot remove objects from the universe you cannot study anything with pure empiricism. Furthermore the act of observation itself effects the results. Each viewing of the dress image is an individual instance of a perception-event but each subsequent instance will be effected by the previous instances. Additionaly your associations with the contept of “a dress” amounts to a model of all dresses that exists inside your mind. You can not help but compare this image of a dress to all the other experiences you have under the heading of “dresses”. In conclusion you can never know what colors the dress, or any dress, really are.
