That white and gold, ergh, blue and black, dress thing?

[groucho]

I just figured I'd find some folks here that were more familiar with color issues.

Now, in traditional photography a yellow filter was called a "minus blue" filter and used to remove excess blue in an image. Say, from problems with color temperature mismatches.

So I can conceive of enough [read: way too much] yellow being added to an image, changing the blue to white and then, well, tinting the fading black into a mustard gold maybe. Hey, I can also conceive of unicorns.

Has anyone with, say, Photoslop and a good knowledge of color adjustment troid taking an image of the blue and black dress, punching up the yellow (like an overexposure in bright afternoon light might cause) and then seeing if it really could be rendered as white and gold by a simple mistake in the white balance and exposure?

I just can't help thinking, this is a very clever PR exercise, somewhat as genuine as the "shark eats helicopter" photos that went around a couple of years ago. There's just no way it is a subjective "perceptual" difference, as the Nooze keeps saying. Black ain't gold, unless you're in the oil business.

[terrie]

I have no idea what the "dress thing" refs but, I'd say it all depends on how/what you are viewing the image--print (newspaper? glossy mag?), screen (web? Photoshop or other imaging software?), camera...

Terrie

[groucho]

I guess for the last two days you've been missing all the TV Nooze. Apparently someone wore a dress at one of the award shows, which looks white(ish) with gold trim in the press photo. But, the manufacturer swears is is medium/dark blue with black trim, so there's been a whole lot of fuss about it.

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/whit...ry?id=29261175

A real head-banger.(G)

[terrie]

Ahhh...thanks for the link...


Terrie

[Bo Aakerstrom]

Read this article on wired.com that has a plausible explanation. Messed with a copy of the image and you have to be quite drastic to change from white and gold to blue and black.

I can't help but think this is some kind of PR exercise too.

Missed when the shark ate the helicopter. Bet he got stomach ache afterwards!

[groucho]

Also bear in mind, the human eye cannot see yellow. It see red, green, and blue, period. The human brain plays perceptual tricks to deduce the existence of yellow from the green:blue balance, and of course, "gold" relies heavily on yellow, which we aren't seeing.

[Franca]

For the record, the photo never looked white and gold to me. Not on any computer or device at any angle in any light. I was completely unable to visualize it as white and gold even after looking at someone's photoshopped simulation of what the "white and gold" camp were seeing.

In my opinion it has nothing whatsoever to do with color balance/white balance and everything to do with being drastically overexposed and probably also cropped or digitally-zoomed way too far in. It's just a really, really bad photo. While I didn't take a good photo of the blue and black dress and try to turn it into white and gold (since it never looked white and gold to me in the first place), I did take the crappy photo and turned it from artifact-y medium blue and brown to almost cobalt blue and black as the actual dress was shown to be in a good photo. See the attached screen shot of my IrfanView color correction settings. You'll note I didn't touch RGB, only the Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma. Nothing to be done about the thing being over-zoomed but adjusting the exposure did get rid of some of the artifacts.

[terrie]

franca: It's just a really, really bad photo

Proving that lovely old adage:

garbage in, garbage out...


Terrie