Watch the dress change from Black & Blue to White & Gold right in front of your eyes
The effect here isn’t as perfect as the original tumblr photo that was ferociously circulating the Internet. That photo exhibits a chance occurrence of over-exposure and weird color balance to make an incredibly convincing perception of white and gold.
Let’s recount what happened…
A human person was shopping in a boutique (just guessing here) and took a photo of a dress that she saw. In real life, the dress was black and blue. However, when she looked at the photo on her phone, it appeared white and gold.
Here’s what probably occurred:
There was a light of sunlight behind the dress, and her camera sensor did not compensate for the light levels appropriately. The image was blown out.. or to be more precise, it was likely over-exposed and the color balance was not true to the in-person experience.
The ongoing debate about the colors seen in the photograph has little to do with the true color of the physical dress in real life, and much more to do with how the image was created and how it is displayed.
Various screens can produce a wide range of output…
Everyone is arguing about what colors they see, and no one seems to have noticed the implicit assumption that all of our computer / phone / tablet / TV displays are representing colors in the same way.
Screens can differ from each other in many ways. Because of differences in construction, LCD and LED displays have a lot of variation, and some are very inaccurate when reproducing colors. Also, on some displays, the picture looks consistent from a wide range of viewing angles, whereas on other displays the colors become distorted.
This cheap LED-backlit LCD display on the left makes the dress look white and gold from above, but black and blue from below.
In the comparison to two other displays shown below, you can also see that the LED display has a significant blue tint, meaning that it can’t reproduce yellows, greens, and golds accurately.
Both the CCFL-lit Dell monitor and the LED-backlit MacBook Pro shown here use IPS (In-Plane Switching) construction to maximize picture quality over all viewing angles. The Toshiba probably uses VA (Vertical-alignment) construction.
I’ll just leave this here for you …
Image obtained via: amazon.co.uk
