iPhone
White and Gold Dress Turns Blue and Black With iPhone App
The white and gold dress that half the Internet sees as blue and black is the most searched phrase on Google for the last 24 hours, and the topic of heated debates this morning in offices as users bicker about who is right and why black and blue dress is definitely white and gold. So, what color is the dress really? You can use your iPhone to see the real color of the dress and a free app to help you pick the color of anything else you happen to run into.
As someone who is not to be trusted with colors not a week goes by where blue and black or pink and red aren’t confused, but that’s not the case here. Instead of a simple disagreement about the color of the dress the Internet went all out arguing about the white and gold dress that is really a black and blue dress.
The white gold dress. or is it the blue black dress? Image from Swiked
There are two things wrong with this photo, which led to the famous white and gold dress debate of 2015. First off the photo is overexposed. This happens when you allow too much light into the camera and the end result doesn’t show the true color of the photo. Another problem, according to regex.info is that the photo colors aren’t properly tied to the photo. This means, “Windows and Mac browsers and apps treat the colors randomly” according to the image profile tool. That is why it looks different colors on different devices.
But, more importantly, is this a white and gold dress or a blue and black dress?
If you want to see this for yourself you just need to go to the original Tumbler post and download the white and gold dress to your iPhone. At this stage it looks like a white and gold dress, but what happens when you open it up and tell Photos to automatically fix it just like you should on your photos that don’t look right.
In this second photo you can see that the dress is starting to look blue and black, but there are still traces of white and gold in the dress depending how you look at it. This is with the basic iPhone Photos app auto fix, but there are still areas of the photo that are way too bright. This is because the dress is over-exposed.
When you use the iPhone Photos app to fix the photo of the white gold dress it becomes a black and blue dress.
If you use the edit tool to adjust the amount of light in the photo the dress approaches the normal color of black and blue. Sliding the Light indicator all the way to the dark side brings the bright white parts of the photo back into a more realistic brightness and if you look at the photo from an angle you will see a black and blue dress. The colors still look a little off because there is only so much you can do to fix a bad photo.
Color ID app picks the real color of the dress.
If you still aren’t convinced you can download the free Color ID app and point it at your monitor or a photo that you print out. This app reads out the color that it sees, and even when pointed at the white part of the dress it will tel you that it is some form of blue. The app doesn’t do as well on the gold parts of the dress, switching from olive to grey, but it does show some of what is happening in this photo.
You can see the original dress here. Click on the blue color option to see that color option and then click on one of the photos of a model and you’ll clearly see a black and blue dress.
This is the real black and blue dress.
This doesn’t mean you are color blind or even color dumb. There are a lot of things wrong with this photo and you may still see the corrected image as white and gold, but that’s not the case. If you are worried about your eyes, you can use this free iPhone color blindness test or talk to your eye doctor about this on your next visit.
