Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/18/what-color-are-these-skulls.html
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Freaky deaky and cool.
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Photoshop’s eyedropper tool calls shenanigans. The red stripes on the right are significantly lighter than the red stripes on the left. It looks like somebody couldn’t leave good enough alone and spiked the image to “prove” the illusion even better.
Edit: I checked the original image at Popular Science, not the even-more-processed image on BB. And I checked the center-most pixels within the stripes, not the artifact-corrupted exterior pixels. And there was still a significant, noticeable difference in the RGB values.
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I saw the red on blue immediately; the skull on the stage-right side took longer for me to recognize as marginally the same shade.
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Someone mentioned the Very Bad Wizards podcast on the bbs recently, and I started listening. In the first episode, on free will and determinism, they mentioned optical illusions as a metaphor for how we can know something intellectually (i.e. people are not solely responsible for their actions) without it changing how we feel about them or see them (i.e. people still tend to desire individual apologies, restitution and taking of responsibility). It was an interesting thought that popped back up here wrapping my peepers around this teaser.
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I don’t think it was intentionally “goosed” specifically but It’s lots more than jpeg compression. Most of it is the effects of poor resizing workflow though. Most resizing filters include the level of pixels several pixels away when determining the final color of the resized pixel and then after all resizing you need to add some form of sharpening, which also includes a gaussian blur that is several pixels wide (hence the term “unsharp mask”). So when the bars only a few pixels wide you get really gross artifacts that ruin the thing that you’re trying to demonstrate in an image like this. The image at the head of the bb article is so bad that the pixel colors from the two sides don’t match at all.
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All I’m seeing is millions of very tiny red, green & blue bars of varying intensities. But maybe I’m looking too closely?!
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We had to do similar things foundation year in art school. We used coloraid paper cutouts so there could be no cheating. One project was to take two identical squares of color and by changing the background make them appear as different as possible. Another was to take two squares that were as different as possible and make them appear the same by changing the background. If you don’t have a handle on this sort of thing you end up being rubbish when it comes to designing with color.
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“What colour are these skulls?”
“Um… Blood for the Blood God?”
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I call BS on this also. Light is color and any one color in the real world coming from a real object is a mixture of wavelengths that is interpreted by our senses and optical lobe. The sculls don’t represent an illusion any more than any other color you see in nature, except the scale is different. It’s the schrodinger’s cat of colors - referring to a small scale phenomenon in the macro world, not quantum superposition.
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Yeap. Even with the artifacts removed, the illusion persists. See attached (which was based on the bigger version).
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Hey, I know-- let’s make a dress with this pattern on it.
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Wheesht, Yanny!
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“Harriers for the Cup!”
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I decided to redraw these skulls in Adobe Illustrator. I adjusted some of the shapes for better alignment and symmetry. My exported hires JPG has almost no artifacts and I can guarantee that the reds are exactly the same. Click on the attachment to see the full version.
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No shenanigans; I had some doubts too, so I decided to test this further. See my post above.
They are orange and purple. The reality is my perception and I refuse to zoom in and change it
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I dunno, these “what color is this” stories have become a lot less interesting to me.
I mean, yeah, human vision isn’t as clear cut as it seems; we know. The brain does a lot of post-processing on the photons that our eyes pick up. This is a known thing by now, isn’t it? How is this still a surprise to people?
Sorry for being grumpy, I’m just tired of having the “what color is this dress” conversation every few months.
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Turns out every so-called “color” on my screen was made from tightly packed rectangles of nothing more than varying brightnesses of red, green and blue.
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