As you are aware, this has never been about what the dress actually is in real life. I want to know how you look at a golden-brown color like that, not even a dark one, and think it's black. Do you honestly see it as black, or do you have some kind of internal thought process of "hmmm, those stripes look gold because that's a really reflective material that would be black if I saw it in person under normal lighting conditions" ?
Our brains are reducing the brightness of the lighting that our eyes see, so that the brown becomes the black that it actually is. It's the same process that your eyes are, for who knows what reason, seeing the blue as 'white but with a blue tint' from who knows where.
Like I said before, look at the background. Look at it in the three pictures above, in fact. Sure, the one on the left now appears so washed out that the dress is now gold and pale blue. But can you make out anything at all in the background now? No, because the whole photo is totally bleached out. Meaning that this could not possibly be the dress's colors. And you
still can't see any source of this 'blue light'. But now look at the photo on the right. You can actually start to make out some details in the background - arguably even somebody's hair - because the photo has been adjusted to its subjects' correct colors.
Our brains could instantly tell, using the background as a cue, that the photo was too bright, and therefore our brains should increase the contrast and darken that brown into black.
That said, even when I cover up the background to remove the context, the 'white' that you're seeing is still very clearly light blue. I mean dear god, this entire forum background is almost white so you have a point of reference literally adjacent to the photo...
Poll
