'Most people will see the blue on the white background as blue,' Conway says. So when context varies, so will people's visual perception.

'It became clear that the appropriate point in the image to balance from is the black point,' Harris says. And when Harris reversed the process, balancing to the darkest pixel in the image, the dress popped blue and black. 'When I attempted to white-balance the image based on that idea, though, it didn't make any sense.' He saw blue in the highlights, telling him that the white he was seeing was blue, and the gold was black. 'I initially thought it was white and gold,' says Neil Harris, our senior photo editor. Other people attribute it to the dress.'Įven WIRED's own photo team-driven briefly into existential spasms of despair by how many of them saw a white-and-gold dress-eventually came around to the contextual, color-constancy explanation. My brain attributes the blue to the illuminant. 'Then I cut a little piece out and looked at it, and completely out of context it's about halfway in between, not this dark blue color. 'I actually printed the picture out,' he says. Even Neitz, with his weird white-and-gold thing, admits that the dress is probably blue. The point is, your brain tries to interpolate a kind of color context for the image, and then spits out an answer for the color of the dress.

Its fine meme background