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Usually that system works just fine. This image, though, hits some kind of perceptual
boundary. That might be because of
how people are wired. Human beings
evolved to see in daylight, but daylight
changes color. That chromatic axis
varies from the pinkish red of dawn,
up through the blue-white of
noontime, and then back down to
reddish twilight. “What’s happening
here is your visual system is looking
at this thing, and you’re trying to
discount the chromatic bias of the
daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a
neuroscientist who studies color and
vision at Wellesley College. “So
people either discount the blue side,
in which case they end up seeing
white and gold, or discount the gold
side, in which case they end up with
blue and black.” (Conway sees blue
and orange, somehow.)
We asked our ace photo and design
team to do a little work with the image
in Photoshop, to uncover the actual
red-green-blue composition of a few
pixels. That, we figured, would answer
the question definitively. And it came
close.
In the image as presented on, say, BuzzFeed, Photoshop tells us that the places
some people see as blue do indeed track as blue. But…that probably has more to do
with the background than the actual color. “Look at your RGB values. R 93, G 76, B
50. If you just looked at those numbers and tried to predict what color that was, what
would you say?” Conway asks.
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