We have a new blue dress, apparently.
Remember the dress debate from 2015 when people were arguing about whether this dress was Black and Blue... or White and Gold?
I will be honest... that one got me for a minute. I was team gold and white for a few minutes.... then I saw black and blue... then I saw gold and white again.
...but then I saw an advertising pic of the same dress in good light.
After that... nothing I could do could make it look Gold/White again. My brain had re-centered my color memory.
It appears we have a new entrant in to this little game. The Pink or Gray Shoe.
This is the pic that is making the rounds that is causing debate, though, I admit this one doesn't phase me much.
This is the pic that is making the rounds that is causing debate, though, I admit this one doesn't phase me much.
It is a pic of a hand holding a VAN'S tennis shoe with a small table in the background. The color balance is horrendous. It looks like someone shot it on slide film under fluorescent light back in the days of film. (More on this in a moment)
Some people see a gray shoe with mint green laces and sole. To me it is clearly a pink and white shoe. Maybe I would be fooled if the hand weren't in the picture. But I clearly see the hand of a man. I would say it looks like someone of possibly Indian or Middle Eastern descent... but I happen to know that nobody has blue-green skin. So, coming from a photography/art background... that lets me know the color tint has a strong cyan-green shift. The soles and the stripes immediately correct to the most likely color for sneakers from this company (White) and I can see that the shoe is pink.
Why do some other people see it the other way? I have looked around and seen some try to tie it into the left brain/right brain argument, though I view this skeptically and would like to see some data on that. It seems unrelated and unscientific to me, but we can look at that at the end.
First... a little about color balance.
Have you ever done one of these?
Some people see a gray shoe with mint green laces and sole. To me it is clearly a pink and white shoe. Maybe I would be fooled if the hand weren't in the picture. But I clearly see the hand of a man. I would say it looks like someone of possibly Indian or Middle Eastern descent... but I happen to know that nobody has blue-green skin. So, coming from a photography/art background... that lets me know the color tint has a strong cyan-green shift. The soles and the stripes immediately correct to the most likely color for sneakers from this company (White) and I can see that the shoe is pink.
Why do some other people see it the other way? I have looked around and seen some try to tie it into the left brain/right brain argument, though I view this skeptically and would like to see some data on that. It seems unrelated and unscientific to me, but we can look at that at the end.
First... a little about color balance.
Have you ever done one of these?
You stare at them for a while intently with relaxed eyes... and then quickly look over to a clean blank white surface or wall and you should notice that the image persists in your eyes for a while but in the correct colors. The "CORRECT" colors are simply the OPPOSITE colors of these.
The opposite of red is cyan. The opposite of blue is yellow. The opposite of white is black.
But... WHY are the visual centers in your brain trying to pump in exact opposite colors from what you see? The short answer is that is probably a selected-for trait to help the survival of the species, but we can break it down a little bit better than that. Your eyes simply do this all the time. To assure we can sense food and predators, we rely on having good color perception in many different lighting situations. And that means we need to correct under many different colors of light.
Humans actually have pretty good color vision, (having evolved as both predator AND prey.) Not the best in the animal kingdom, perhaps, but we hold our own pretty well, and can detect around 10 million different colors. Humans are trichromats. We have three color receptors in our eyes. But a dog has only two... and so dogs cant see red. Mantis Shrimp, on the other hand, have TWELVE color receptors to our three... but for some reason, they can only differentiate wavelengths of 25 nanometers or more... (whereas we can differentiate 4 nanometer differences.)
But I digress. We evolved seeing things under the sun, which... on a sunny day floods our world with bright 4800 Kelvin temperature light. Our eyes are tuned by thousands of years of natural selection to see the most different colors of reflected light when lit by a source of this color temperature. That is why the camera flash has been created to produce the same color as the sun.
But even cavemen had to deal with the constant changing of the color of the light. It is warmer in the morning, and red under a beautiful sunset... or in the shade where the sun cant reach, everything is lit by the blue sky instead... or sometimes before a storm... the sky might turn green. Our eyes are designed to automatically correct that color... they do this by pumping in the complementary color. The brain is constantly playing with the color balance in our visual cortex to CORRECT for different color casts caused by the changing world around us.
As man evolved we brought even more unnatural colored light. A regular tungsten light bulb is about 2800 degrees kelvin. Cool White Fluorescent is about 4000 degrees kelvin. Halogen is 3200.
BUT YET your eyes and brain constantly adjust... that red shirt you are wearing looks just as red under the office fluorescents or your bedside lamp as it does in the parking lot on a sunny day. Because your eyes are constantly adjusting the overall environment color to try to correct what it sees.
Todays digital cameras use "Auto White Balance" to do the same thing. But back in the days of film... it was much more tricky. Film couldn't adjust on its own. We had "Daylight" film that was optimized for 5500 degree Kelvin light and "Tungsten" film that was rated for 3400. Then we had to use all kinds of filters to fix the color so that the pics didn't look all weird. Multiple light sources were a nightmare to deal with. Things got so much easier with digital photography
Still... there are limitations, and there is only so much the brain can do to compensate for different colors of light. Under a red light bulb, red is the only color. Flame is pretty close as well... so around the campfire with your camping buddies, or beside the fireplace with your lover...
If the flame is the only source of light, you might not be able to tell blue from green from black... you have simply gone too far from the norm. A cat could do better at that range.
So back to this shoe. I am used to correcting for color, having been in the photography field since the days of printing color photos for a living. These days photoshop makes it easier. But stuff happens instantly in my brain, depending on clues. And here I see a hand holding the shoe that gives me all the info I need.
But... WHY are the visual centers in your brain trying to pump in exact opposite colors from what you see? The short answer is that is probably a selected-for trait to help the survival of the species, but we can break it down a little bit better than that. Your eyes simply do this all the time. To assure we can sense food and predators, we rely on having good color perception in many different lighting situations. And that means we need to correct under many different colors of light.
Humans actually have pretty good color vision, (having evolved as both predator AND prey.) Not the best in the animal kingdom, perhaps, but we hold our own pretty well, and can detect around 10 million different colors. Humans are trichromats. We have three color receptors in our eyes. But a dog has only two... and so dogs cant see red. Mantis Shrimp, on the other hand, have TWELVE color receptors to our three... but for some reason, they can only differentiate wavelengths of 25 nanometers or more... (whereas we can differentiate 4 nanometer differences.)
But I digress. We evolved seeing things under the sun, which... on a sunny day floods our world with bright 4800 Kelvin temperature light. Our eyes are tuned by thousands of years of natural selection to see the most different colors of reflected light when lit by a source of this color temperature. That is why the camera flash has been created to produce the same color as the sun.
But even cavemen had to deal with the constant changing of the color of the light. It is warmer in the morning, and red under a beautiful sunset... or in the shade where the sun cant reach, everything is lit by the blue sky instead... or sometimes before a storm... the sky might turn green. Our eyes are designed to automatically correct that color... they do this by pumping in the complementary color. The brain is constantly playing with the color balance in our visual cortex to CORRECT for different color casts caused by the changing world around us.
As man evolved we brought even more unnatural colored light. A regular tungsten light bulb is about 2800 degrees kelvin. Cool White Fluorescent is about 4000 degrees kelvin. Halogen is 3200.
BUT YET your eyes and brain constantly adjust... that red shirt you are wearing looks just as red under the office fluorescents or your bedside lamp as it does in the parking lot on a sunny day. Because your eyes are constantly adjusting the overall environment color to try to correct what it sees.
Todays digital cameras use "Auto White Balance" to do the same thing. But back in the days of film... it was much more tricky. Film couldn't adjust on its own. We had "Daylight" film that was optimized for 5500 degree Kelvin light and "Tungsten" film that was rated for 3400. Then we had to use all kinds of filters to fix the color so that the pics didn't look all weird. Multiple light sources were a nightmare to deal with. Things got so much easier with digital photography
Still... there are limitations, and there is only so much the brain can do to compensate for different colors of light. Under a red light bulb, red is the only color. Flame is pretty close as well... so around the campfire with your camping buddies, or beside the fireplace with your lover...
If the flame is the only source of light, you might not be able to tell blue from green from black... you have simply gone too far from the norm. A cat could do better at that range.
So back to this shoe. I am used to correcting for color, having been in the photography field since the days of printing color photos for a living. These days photoshop makes it easier. But stuff happens instantly in my brain, depending on clues. And here I see a hand holding the shoe that gives me all the info I need.
Lets run a quick "auto color correction" on this image in photoshop elements. This will adjust the image until it shows the most different colors possible... (since a color cast mutes this.) This is a down and dirty way of correcting MOST color bias quickly.
So... one click and now we have this. It is a much more natural version. The hand also looks more like a normal skin tone.
If you saw gray and green... is your brain still holding on to it and trying to correct it back?
That is OK if it is, and fascinating... but using photoshop or any photo editing software, we can remove our brains biases from the equation. I opened the color swatch and clicked on the shoe with the eyedropper tool. The little circle on the color swatch tells us where the color sits in the visible spectrum.
If I take these color values and make a swatch it is this color.
Further corroborating evidence... I give you a video of an unboxing for the model of the shoe itself...
So this one is cut and dry to me... it just needed white balance.
But what about the right brained/left brained argument that is being talked about on some sites discussing this? Is that really relevant?
I am not the best judge. I did one of those silly online tests this morning and this is the response.
(This is ALWAYS my result, BTW. and I have been doing them for years.)
(I am also an INTJ and "Brain Type 9" if any of that stuff is real.)
I believe in some of the right-brained/left brained stuff. Some people ARE more logical and see things simply as they are. They ask no questions. Some people will ask "Why" and come to different discussions. But I see no compelling link between whether you are artistic or logical and how you perceive this image.
Another problem I have with the whole "If you see gray/green then you are left brained" is this. These articles say that it is the more logical people that view it as green... but I just gave you my VERY Left brained "logic/facts/investigation" pathway that got me to the shoe being pink. I would think that the left-brained would be the ones to see the pink and vise versa.
The intuitive right-brained people would be more likely to see it as green, I would think. They don't ask as many questions and accept possibilities. Not the other way around.
So my conclusion... (worth what you paid for it)... is this.
It is just a crappy pic in crappy light of a pink shoe with white laces. Some people will see it a different way... assuming you are color correcting for the source light present as being something different.
But I don't think it says anything about how your mind works. Not in this case. I bet I could find accountants galore that see it as pink and poets that see it as grey and green.
This has been my TED talk.
I believe in some of the right-brained/left brained stuff. Some people ARE more logical and see things simply as they are. They ask no questions. Some people will ask "Why" and come to different discussions. But I see no compelling link between whether you are artistic or logical and how you perceive this image.
Another problem I have with the whole "If you see gray/green then you are left brained" is this. These articles say that it is the more logical people that view it as green... but I just gave you my VERY Left brained "logic/facts/investigation" pathway that got me to the shoe being pink. I would think that the left-brained would be the ones to see the pink and vise versa.
The intuitive right-brained people would be more likely to see it as green, I would think. They don't ask as many questions and accept possibilities. Not the other way around.
So my conclusion... (worth what you paid for it)... is this.
It is just a crappy pic in crappy light of a pink shoe with white laces. Some people will see it a different way... assuming you are color correcting for the source light present as being something different.
But I don't think it says anything about how your mind works. Not in this case. I bet I could find accountants galore that see it as pink and poets that see it as grey and green.
This has been my TED talk.
