This is the best optical illusion ever. The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray. I had to open it in Photoshop to prove it to myself, but it’s true. (Update: For those non-believers without Photoshop, try these animated or static proofs.)
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That was very cool.
I could kind of see it if I squinted my eyes. Then the colors looked more similar.
Crazy! Just Crazy, I checked in Photoshop too, couldn’t believe it… sheesh!
You might like to look at Josef Albers’ book on Color Theory.
Josef Albers’ The Interaction of Color. Sounds a little heady for my tastes; I just like the Jedi mind tricks.
[OT] Maybe you should download one of those neato eyedropper applets so you don’t have to open Photoshop.
And all this time I was told Dr. Pepper and Cherry Coke are the same thing, with different marketing campaigns.
Evelyn Waugh once wrote… I am not I, thou art not he or she, they are not they.
Had Waugh possessed photoshop, well…
It hurts my head every time I look at it. I had to check in Photoshop as well. The animated gif is a good idea, as it almost lets me see the point at which my brain flips out and gives in to the authority of my eyeballs.
I was just watching, and I can’t find a link to it now, a show on National Geographic about the way that eyes adjust to conform to shadows. There was a team working on software that would change pictures to show images not as the camera sees them, but as the eye adjusts to see them.
Actually that strip in the static proof looks like a gradient to my eyes. Freaky!
cool website on color theory. found this one in com arts this month.
http://www.poynter.org/special/colorproject/colorproject/color.html
Eugene, Mac OSX has an App in Application/Utilities/Digital Color Meter that is great at eyedropping colors in a variety of formats. Pretty cool.
I was going to suggest using an eyedropper app too. I use DotColor (http://www.inetis.com/freeware.asp) – it’s free, small, and Just Works (for Windows, at least). Still opened Photoshop, though. 🙂 I even cut small chunks out of each square and put them side by side in a new window. Very odd.
ooo that’s weird.
Try also snipping a bit from the top of the cylinder and then dragging it right to left across the cylinder body. plain green then goes variable green.
I’m trading in my brain for something more reliable.
Indeed — while it’s quite amazing at how easily fooled the human visual system is, it’s really fscking hard it is to replicate it. One of the most interesting courses I ever took was on Perception [primarily the physiological basis of visual processing in humans] … there’s a whole section on color trickery.
i’ve seen this at about 182984432 other blogs today. thats really how many i read a day. and i still don’t believe it.
The difference is: I posted it to the web before anybody else. (I’m the first link on Daypop, and Blogdex too, when it comes back online.)
congrats.
Shut one eye and hold a thin strip of paper in front of the screen so you can’t see the squares in between A and B. This stops the illusion. Then you can easily tell that they are both the same shade. Try it and see!
thats bullshit….if you take out the green object so as to elimante the idea of contrast issues in the eye and you can plainly tell it is not the same colo, yes the two colors both come out black a black that is too dark for either of them. Its all in how the coding for the picture is.