I Don't Know What To Warn For But Optical Illusions - Tumblr Posts

The human brain, guys, is pretty fucking cool. It executes thousands of calculations without ever bothering to notify you. While driving, to figure out how close you are to the car in front of you, while listening, to pick up cues you might not be conscious of, but most importantly, constantly parsing complex visual input from our (totally biased) eyes. You don't have to be aware of how your brain picks up depth from things like parallax or convergence, but you can use it to catch a ball. 

Similarly, you don't have to understand how your eye looks at colors in these images - until someone points out those two pointed-at squares are actually the same color.

Because in the only way your eye needs to understand color - in a way that's relative to all other colors and light - those two aren't the same color. If you see one are red and the other as cyan, your brain and eyes are working in a fashion that is truest to parsing that information correctly and as-needed.

This is why #thedress is stressful and really contentious. Because based on your own optical sensitivity (and for some of us, monitor calibration), the way that your brain parses the light and contrast is being thrown wild because:

The blown-out exposure of the background isn't true to the hues and contrast on the dress itself.

The dress is backlit, but also has reflected color and light back onto it (likely from another light source as well). The values of the dress are noticeably washed out, but the levels of it are completely out of sync with the way the background is.

The specular highlights on the trim aren't really true to the hue of the rest of the trim?.

Significant light-spillage like this in cellphone cameras tends to significantly affect the saturation and hue of an object in the areas affected.

The science side of tumblr is right, but it's important to remember that we see things like this because the brain tries to interpret the cues the eyes give it. Regardless of how right or wrong the eyes are, your brain is trying to figure out absolute color in a situation where the relative colors are inconsistently lit.

Welcome to why artists hate/love color but there's nothing wrong with seeing something different, because once something is in your hands how you see it is up to you - and I don't mean that in the hippy-dippiest of ways. I check anything I paint on as many monitors as I can, because what a painting looks like on my screen to my eyes is less important than what it looks like to the screen and eyes of whoever sees it.

And personally, once I chilled out about spamming twitter about the dress, I remembered why it felt really familiar but like I was on the wrong side of things. I don't have binocular depth perception (and didn't find out until adulthood), so grade-school magic eye puzzles were intensely stressful for me, probably in the same way this dress is for a lot of people.

(Image stolen from Gurney Journey, because James Gurney is a color/light wizard who has other amazing things to talk about when it comes shit)