{"id":4559,"date":"2015-03-18T08:56:24","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T12:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/?p=4559"},"modified":"2015-05-05T14:06:36","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T18:06:36","slug":"black-and-blue-and-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/black-and-blue-and-gray\/","title":{"rendered":"Black, blue, and gray all over"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month a blue-and-black dress<\/a>\u00a0sparked a mass-scale debate about color theory. Even the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and magazines like Wired<\/em><\/a>\u00a0eventually weighed in, explaining how color perception is contingent upon\u00a0context and light sources.<\/p>\n

In honor of the\u00a0unexpected media attention to color theory, Curio features below a gray-and-black dress from c. 1866<\/a>, reproduced from Fashion in Paris: the Various Phases of Feminine Taste and Aesthetics from 1797 to 1897<\/em><\/a> (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898) for the Library\u2019s Paris: Capital of the 19th Century<\/a>\u00a0online project (the project’s items are also available via the Brown Digital Repository<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"black-and-gray-dress_DPS\"<\/a>

Page from Digital Production Services<\/p><\/div>\n

This illustration was hand-colored for Uzanne\u2019s book, and the tones used to represent the dress were not painted as\u00a0scientifically neutral-gray hues. Traditional representational painters counsel \u201cnever use black paint\u201d when rendering scenes, since in reality\u00a0even black rarely visually appears as \u201cpure\u201d black, depending on the particular light sources illuminating\u00a0an area. Scanning or digitally photographing hand-painted artwork often only exacerbates color uncertainty, if images are captured without a known neutral-gray or neutral-white reference point. For example, the same page illustration, scanned for Google Books\u2019 digitized version of the volume<\/a>, ends up looking even more blue-cast, at least in part\u00a0due to the contrast-boosting post-processing applied to Google Books’ page images:<\/p>\n

\"black-and-gray-dress_GB\"<\/a>

Page from Google Books<\/p><\/div>\n

To test your color perception, try X-Rite and Pantone\u2019s Online Color Challenge<\/a> (taking the test on a calibrated and profiled monitor definitely helps).\u00a0By chance, coinciding with\u00a0the media frenzy about the black dress on Tumblr, the philosopher of perception and consciousness David Chalmers<\/a> \u2014 who has written about color perception<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0was giving a series of Royce Lectures<\/a> at Brown, February 24\u201327.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month a blue-and-black dress\u00a0sparked a mass-scale debate about color theory. Even the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0and magazines like Wired\u00a0eventually weighed in, explaining how color perception is contingent upon\u00a0context and light sources. In honor of the\u00a0unexpected media attention to color theory, Curio … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","hentry","category-image-processing","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4559"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4648,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559\/revisions\/4648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.brown.edu\/dps\/curio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}