I wonder how we see others' photos

For reference:

www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

Under no circumstances, am I able to see the middle photo as blue & black as opposed to white & gold. I loaded the pic above into three different editors, and no matter what I did, I could not make the middle dress look like the right dress.

The Wikipedia article on it says:

There is no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant perceptions.[31] The neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe they are a result of how the human brain perceives colour and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes it is connected to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis ... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."

So, I don't understand, at all, how people can think that the middle dress looks more like the right dress (which, by the way, is the "actual color" of the dress) than the left dress.

I did read the article and the Wikipedia article. But unless I missed something, nobody talked to the guys who design sensor systems or design colour space.

The dress is is in shadow and it looks like a cell phone shot. So I guess automatic white balance came into play, as well as all the automated processing that goes on under the cell phone camera hood. I see light blue with gold, however long I look at the middle picture. It is also very true that our eyes do a lot of compensating for shape and colour, and thre are endless optical illusions that prove this.

Under artificial light clothing fabrics can seem to be very different colour wise. Here in Italy, the shop assistent will often take a clothing item out into daylight, to show you the actual colour of the item you are buying.

Maybe making a very small crop and doing some correction might solve the mystery.

Here is a small portion of the middle shot with all the exterior clues removed

A bit of very crude post processing gives us a light blue and black dress, which I believe was the actual colour scheme. I only increased the contrast.

Maybe 10 minutes with a post processing software might have solved the mystery, which I think lies in the photo being taken in the shadows, after which the camera's JPEG engine did some corrections.

seen this 10 years ago on facebook.

No, your edited version is not the original colour scheme.

The Wikipedia link shows the middle picture as being the original photo published in 2015.

The different colors people see is more due to the different color of light the photo is being viewed in imho.

This is the model shot

This is the original picure. I took a small isolated area, and then increased just the contrast. I believe it is all about cell phone JPEG engines.

Removing the background should remove any optical illusions. The cause is a massively overexposed picture being processed by a cell phone JPEG engine. The small portion just shows the colours as they are in the file without messing with our brain.

I am sure some skilful PP could recreate the actual colours.

No, it is not the same photo. The original is taken from behind the model. Your photo is taken from the front of the model. You seem to be making things up as you go along.

The colors people see is more likely due, at least in part, to the lighting condition underwhich the photo is being viewed.

I found a picture of what the colours scheme of the dress really is. I made a small cropped selection od the original picture, excluding outside factors.

It is just a badly proced cell phone picture. You can view the segment in any light you want, the colour does not change on a screen.

We'll just have to disagree on this one.