{"id":376,"date":"2015-02-27T16:15:45","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T16:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/?p=376"},"modified":"2015-02-27T16:30:14","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T16:30:14","slug":"color-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/2015\/02\/27\/color-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"Color Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

We just held a workshop on Adobe Photoshop the other day and discussed colors, capture and display devices, and the potential problems in the beginning of the session. Seeing that the internet is a little confused about the color of a dress<\/a>, here\u2019s my answer to that problem: the dress is blue and black.<\/p>\n

\"original<\/a>

#thedress posted by Tumblr user “swiked” is seen as white-gold or blue-black by the internet.<\/p><\/div>\n

Why? For one, colors are complicated, and two, cameras and screens displaying the images aren\u2019t perfect. But this time, the fault lies mainly on the camera. I won\u2019t repeat the nice scientific explanation Wired Magazine<\/a>\u00a0has written, but if we spend a few minutes investigating the story behind of the image (it was taken at a wedding store<\/a>), we can assume it was probably an upscale environment lit with incandescent spot lights. The problem is that the store is dark and any resulting image will look underexposed, so the camera (probably a smartphone) compensates the sensor’s limitations by brightening the scene via software, but it\u00a0goes\u00a0too far and made the image look overexposed and the colors \u00a0washed out. Then, the software probably assumed the colors were white balanced so it didn\u2019t bother compensating for the incandescent orange light. For some people, their eyes try to fix\u00a0this overexposed\/washed-out image\u00a0and end up\u00a0seeing the dress as gold-white.<\/p>\n

\"compare\"<\/a>

Original cropped image on the left, white balanced image on the right. Photoshop curves on the far right.<\/p><\/div>\n

In order to properly fix this photo, we \u00a0\u201cborrow\u201d the dress behind it as a reference to white balance the photo. However, we have to make the assumption that the dress is black and white. The crop of the original photo shows an overall orange cast on the image. So I bring the image into Photoshop and adjust its color channels and\u00a0increase the blue curve, reduce the red and green curves, and then darken it a little bit (the white line) to counter the software\u2019s overcompensation.<\/p>\n

\"before-after\"<\/a>

Original image on the left, and corrected image on the right. The dress is blue and black.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We just held a workshop on Adobe Photoshop the other day and discussed colors, capture and display devices, and the potential problems in the beginning of the session. Seeing that the internet is a little confused about the color of a dress, here\u2019s my answer to that problem: the dress is blue and black.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/adhc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}