This photo has no red pixels and you’ll refuse to believe it
Mar 1, 2017
Pratik Naik
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I initially refused to believe it when this photo came across my feed. My eyes aren’t broken! I can see they’re strawberries, and they’re definitely red. They have to be trolling us with this image, right?
I immediately took it into Photoshop and used my color picker because I just had to prove myself that my eyes aren’t deceiving me.
This picture has NO red pixels. Great demo of color constancy (ht Akiyoshi Kitaoka) pic.twitter.com/pZHvbB6QHE
— Matt Lieberman (@social_brains) February 27, 2017
I made sure my point sample was set to point sample (the individual pixel). You can’t see my cursor on the print screen but I picked the deepest red I could find.
Uhhh… they all came out gray. That just makes me a little angry! It’s putting my brain in for a complete spin. Try it out for yourself, take it into Photoshop and use your color picker.
So what’s exactly happening? Here’s the reasoning below.
The photo was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a Professor of Psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Japan.
While this time everybody is seeing the same thing, the optical illusion is created through a similar phenomenon that caused so much turmoil with The Dress. It’s called color constancy. It’s your brain’s way of color correcting the world when it’s filtered through different light.
When you look around the world, the light that enters your eye is made of different wavelengths that come from both the pigments of the objects around you and the light that illuminates them. – Source
Thank you to Fizzah Raza for the find!
About the Author
Pratik Naik is a high-end retoucher, photographer, and retouching teacher under his Solstice Retouch brand, he also runs the succesful Retouchist Blog. You can catch Pratik on social media on his Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook. This article was also published here and shared with permission.
We love it when our readers get in touch with us to share their stories. This article was contributed to DIYP by a member of our community. If you would like to contribute an article, please contact us here.
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10 responses to “This photo has no red pixels and you’ll refuse to believe it”
But it has to have red pixels if it’s gray. Otherwise you’d just get shades of cyan, which is what green and blue make in absence of red. For gray, you need all three pixel colors to be activated. And as a professional printer, I know not to trust the colors Photoshop’s eye dropper reports. I’ve been burnt by that think many times! But in any case, I get the principle behind it, and it is an interesting illusion.
Same photo just color balanced. Nice hoax.
By “no red pixels” the author means all pixels have a R value equal to or less than G and/or B.
I actually believe it. It’s “relatively” red compared to rest of the scene and my brain makes an offset of the cyan shadows.
Is this right at all? Correct me if I’m mistaken, but I think this photo does have red pixels… it just doesn’t have colors with the majority of tones in the red spectrum. Because you know, to make those shades of gray, you need red pixels.
Here’s the same image with no red pixels at all. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/679e4d1f917eae45bc2954a05f4cba2007b3aa739a07ab559317cd9076a87eb1.jpg
I do get the effect though… color version of the shadow on top of a chess board illusion.
I did a similar test. I’m a filmmaker, so I chose to import the image into Adobe Premier and run it through the vectorscope, which would give me the color information based on pixels. It comes up all cyan. ???????????? WTF??????
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1a5a36db90cff2c3aacd7d473e00ba988a8878f355e3fd2229fd813ba8271ea2.png
Here is a selection of just the tip of the strawberry at 5 O’clock.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6e388e19213ab1112268a250f11c84a4a8e82deeeed382fe54dfe824d6658c07.jpg
Here is the same tip with some of the shadow area below it.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/163eb97dd919498e611290ef09dfc453dac1600f5e1662f50dfc0723935d28de.jpg
At SF MOMA there is a bathroom that is painted entirely bright red. When you walk out into the hallway after finishing your business the walls look cyan for a few moments before your brain adapts. Same principle.
While there are no truly red pixels in the photo, the Red channel is very much there. This is a bit misleading.
Yip, it’s stupid. They’re saying “look, nothing red!” even though there are clearly red strawberries there, so the claim is surprising, hence causing people to try and find out more, only to discover that they’re using a stupid definition of “no red”.
If you look at the version Renato has posted, and someone said “this has no red pixels in it”, then you’d say “well obviously it doesn’t” and it’s not surprising.
Similarly if the original picture were presented as “the red saturation is always lower than green or blue for all pixels in this image”, I think most people would say “that’s not surprising given how it looks, what’s so interesting about that?”
So it’s only by using misleading language that this image has any particular interest. Otherwise it’s just a novel curiosity.