From what I have read from legit sites, the image is seen as gold and a very light blue. The dress in real life has never been made in anything but blue and black. From what I have read it was a lighting trick combined with possible cropping.
It’s not a “trick”. It’s just that some people are very easily confused and highly suggestible, look at pictures on ****ty-quality cellphone screens in surroundings whose lighting doesn’t match their phone display’s white point, don’t have experience looking at ****ty-quality images and understanding what they see in them, and have no ability to reason their way through visual problems,
Here’s the original image:
The lighting in this scene is obviously quite yellow. This is obvious if we look at anything in the background (other than the blown-out splotch at top right, which seems to be some daylight leaking through a window or something). It’s especially obvious if we look at the dress at bottom left, which is immediately behind the foreground dress, and is obviously supposed to be black and white.
Here’s a version where I’ve fixed the white balance so the background dress is neutral:
There is really no way to interpret this as a “white” dress. That is, there’s no way to construct this specific image if the dress were truly white, without either photoshopping the **** out of everything, using a specially designed camera/sensor, or else using some very strong blue spotlight shining on the dress, and some extremely yellow lighting in the background.
Speaking as someone who has spent years studying human color vision, I’m still incredulous that people think the dress looks white after substantial deliberation and multiple image viewings, and I would be very interested to have some kind of better data on what context they’re in when calling the dress white. I’d love to see a survey showing:
(a) how they first heard about this dress and what was told to them before/while looking at the picture
(b) whether they have normal color vision
(c) what the lighting conditions were in the environment when they looked at the picture
(d) what device they used to see the picture (details like how big the screen was, how high resolution, what white balance, some idea of the display’s color reproduction qualities)
(e) gender
Here’s my best shot at white balancing the photo to make the dress look “white”. Note, in this version the background is now absurdly yellow. And the dress still looks kinda bluish, with “gold” trim a pretty big stretch of the imagination.
TL;DR: people have broken vision and broken logical reasoning skills
