Am 28.02.2015 um 15:54 schrieb MichaelJF:

> But this would only explain one part of the black-blue vs. White-Gold riddle.

I think the enigma is easily explained as a combination of multiple effects.

First, the facts:

(1) One very obvious technical flaw of the image is that the background 
is hopelessly overexposed.

(2) The image has another (related?) technical flaw, in that there is a 
yellowish overlay across the entire image; this might be due to 
overexposure, stray light from a poor or dirty lens, an uncalibrated 
camera, some automatic whitepoint adjustment gone rogue, or a 
combination thereof. At any rate, it results in a significant shift in 
brightnss and colour contrast, and also some shift in hue, of the dress; 
thus, instead of pitch black and royal blue we all physically see a kind 
of brownish grey and pastel blue.

(3) Most viewers' displays and/or viewing environments are probably not 
calibrated, adding a multitude of other brightness, contrast and colour 
distortions, which differ between viewers.

Now, it all boils down to how individual people's brains make sense of 
the image, which is a result of the above different visual input 
combined with different viewer expectations. There are essentially three 
options:

(A) The brain correctly identifies the flaws of the original image, 
auto-correcting the colours of the dress back to the original royal blue 
& black.

(B) The brain takes the overexposured background as an indication that 
the image was taken against the light source, expecting the dress to be 
underexposed, and thus performing some auto-"correction" that in fact 
just enhances the effect to the point where the dress is seen as white & 
gold.

(C) The brain takes the colours of the dress at face value (to some 
degree, that is), seeing neither the original royal blue & deep black 
nor the reported white & gold, but a pastel blue & slightly brownish 
dark grey. (This is actually what my brain seems to be doing, at least 
when viewing the image on my super-duper calibrated display.)

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