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Journalism of Courage
A black-and-white photo that users can see in colour is the latest viral image on social media. The photo shows a group of young girls posing with a small tortoise.
While the entire photo is in black and white, it has coloured lines within the image. The brilliant optical illusion basically tricks the human brain into seeing a colour image, and it’s only when you look closely that you realise it.
Lionel Page, an economist at UTC Economics, shared the picture on Twitter recently and got everyone talking and discussing about why the human brain does this.
“What you ‘see’ is what your brain predicts the reality to be, given the imperfect information it gets” he wrote online.
While most couldn’t comprehend what was happening, others explained the science behind it.
https://twitter.com/thewirv/status/1156831401033027584
https://twitter.com/tobybartlett/status/1156443631449968641
https://twitter.com/WJadam024/status/1155321043566788608
https://twitter.com/Rite_Brite/status/1155153931271434240
https://twitter.com/AndrewPullin/status/1155173911450927105
Well, in case you are wondering what’s this all about, it’s actually an image digitally modified for a visual experiment. Øyvind Kolås, the digital media artist and software developer who developed it, described the technique as a ‘colour assimilation grid illusion’. He said the image achieves the effect by simply laying a grid of selectively coloured lines over the originally black-and-white image.
“An over-saturated coloured grid overlaid on a grayscale image causes the grayscale cells to be perceived as having colour,” Kolås explained on his Patreon page.
