How do people see the dress as Black/Blue when the RGB values shows that the color of the dress in the Image is a light purple and a brown ish color?
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That’s because it pretty much is black and blue. The black just happens to be lighter, the blue is more mild, and there’s the brown-gold.
I don’t understand how anyone could possibly see white though.
The idea is that your eyes adjust for ambient lighting conditions to determine the real color of the objects viewed. In this case the photograph is evidently washed out from bright lighting behind it, resulting in altered colors. While we can directly sample the colors recorded in the photograph those aren’t actually the colors of the original dress (obviously blue and black).
People who think it is white and gold are misinterpreting the washed out color alteration as the original color, assuming the blue tint is the skewed color. They assume the dress is in some sort of blue shadow instead of a yellow glare.
[1 of my sources](https://saseye.com/2015/02/27/are-we-all-colorblind/amp/)
Because colour is relative to context. An object made of the exact same material will give different RGB values in a photography depending on context. If it’s in the shade then the white balance will be slightly blue. Also two different materials could give the same RgB values depending on context. If your brain thinks it’s seeing the dress in the shade then it thinks it’s white and gold, but if it thinks it’s in daylight then it sees those same values as blue and black
Because [perceived colour depends on context](https://youtu.be/HeKuX063bcs).
If you are inside with fluorescent lights or you are outside in sunlight, the same RGB values will feel very different. This is because the light that’s reflecting off of something depends on the light that’s hitting it in the first place. So, we have learned to judge colour based on surroundings. The trick with the picture of the dress is that were not sure of the context. We don’t know whether the light hitting it is from the shop, the camera, or the sun. So our brains can process the same RGB values differently depending on which light source we think is there. This is added to by the fact that the background is very well lit (i.e. washed out), so we imagine the dress must be also.
Because there are other white objects in the picture, and holding the dress up against these pretty much instantly disqualifies it from being white/gold.
Because it is a picture. If I take a picture of a dark room, you will see my chair is black or dark red. If I were to turn the lights on, you would observe an orange chair. These are two wildly different RGB values. You get similar results from any change in lighting.
The human brain is smart enough to look beyond such simplicities as ‘rgb values’ when observing an object. After all, we do not care if it is dark or light, or near sunset, we still conclude that the same apple is the same color.
By using context, we determine color with a complexity far beyond what a computer normally would.
In the case of the dress, the backlighting of the sun indicates two things. First, that the dress is in the shade. Second, that our eyes may be more saturated to red light. You know how color looks a bit wrong when you come in from a sunny day? That.
So, those of us that see a yellow and white dress assume that these are the original colors before those two effects.
Those of us that see a blue and black dress assume that those are the original colors.
Note that nobody thinks it is a light purple and brown color, because the context clues show us that this color would not make sense.
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