Red is complimentary to cyan.
If the cyan were switched with yellow, the can would appear blue.
Also, it's not our brains creating the red, it's our eyes. They get exhausted of seeing the cyan and replace it with red.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Huh, it shows up as black to me.
It depends on the size you are viewing it at. This works well on small screens but less well on large screens
So if the can shown wasn't Coke, but Sprite, it would still appear red? Or is it a mix of both? The eyes are confused and the brain fills in? Like when seeing pink as mentioned elsewhere.
Your brain isn't filling in anything. Your blue and green receptors get oversaturated by the cyan, which causes your red receptors to be more sensitive to the white light than the other two, which is why it appears red. The effect happens in your eye, not in your brain.
It's not marketing, just colour theory. The same idea has been used by painters for ages.
It is when you use cova cola instead of, lolipop, santa, flag, flower or some other red object.
Oh weird, I assume this is just because the white is relatively red compared to the cyan, right? As in if you took any image and coloured it in the same way then it would also look red.
Hand doesn't look red tho
Jokes on you, I'm moderately red green colorblind so I wouldn't realize it if there was red present
Do you see the Coke can as a different color from the background?
I think there's something more going on here than just "marketing". Because if you look at the tiny thumbnail in the OP it's very clearly red, and you can even load that thumbnail into an image editor and zoom in to see slightly reddish pixels.
So something happens when scaling this image that actually results in a red hue, and I don't think my computers image scaling algorithms are also falling for "marketing". I would guess it's actually some kind of sub-pixel trick that makes it seem like there's colors there which aren't, and that's why the image scaling algorithms also reveal the same colors you see.
That's wild as fuck. If I actually concentrate on the "red" it becomes white and then only becomes red again if I look away for a moment.
She's right.
Is this because our brains have been programmed to see Coca Cola can as red? Or does it have something to do with the way the black and white boxes are organized? (I.e. if it were a sprite can, it would still be red)
I think it's a bit of both. The light blue color used is so called "complement color", meaning it's exactly the opposite on the color wheel to the Coca Cola red. Black and white pattern suggests to our brain to play with contrast. And of course we all know Coca Cola from all the marketing.
Btw, After staring at it for a while I can kinda switch between red and white at will. Anyone else?
Interesting :) And yes, for me it also became easy to switch once I was aware of the truth of what I was looking at.
If you look directly at the can you can see it as white, but if you look elsewhere and the can is only in your peripheral vision it seems to always be interpreted as red.
At the size it is on my phone screen it looks very red. Zooming in makes it look like the red switches to white.
The cyan is the one playing the trick. I can see the black and white nature without zooming when focusing on the logo or something. Sometimes it randomly changes from b/w to red
It's effectively your brain doing automatic white balance, it sees everything being tinted cyan so it just sorta subtracts cyan from the area, which results in white being reddish
you can do this physically (by tiring out the colour-sensing cells in your eyes) if you stare at a colour for about 30 seconds then quickly look at a white surface, you should see the inverse of the first colour.
It’s actually all just white light at different wavelengths, which tricks your brain into seeing different “colours”.
White light is the combination of all those wavelengths. It is only the combination that makes it "white" in exactly the same way that a smaller range of wavelengths are "red" or "blue".
Making your brain do exactly what it's supposed to do is a weird way is "tricking" it.
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I only see the red when its small, in the thumbnail its red, but when I open the image its very black and white.
The white has more red in it than green and blue, so that's probably the cause of the illusion.
If you zoom in to see that it's black and white, and then zoom back out again, it stays black and white. But if you look away for a bit to forget, maybe change the angle you're looking at it, it turns red again.
For me zooming out changes it back to red.
When its small thumbnail I can see it but when I look at the full size image I appear to be able to turn the effect off at will.
I'm colorblind this trick doesn't work with me
...I was gonna say it took until it was shrunk down to the thumbnail to see red, but nope, it actually has red in it in the thumbnail.
Guess this is specific to how often you see cans of coca-cola?
Here, I put the image through a ditherer (only available colours are black, cyan, white). I don't see any red at all now.
[edit}
Actually, that "red" is mostly just gray so I played myself here. Still, the luminosity must be closer to red before I detect it as red, white doesn't do it.
Weird but if I focus my mind so to say it appears white but then if I relax then again red
And what color does white have?
FFFCFCF9
This is one of those actually cool optical illusions
Except that there is. Alright, maybe not exactly, but...
The whites that you see as white (in the other white parts which don't seem red), are shifted like #E0F9F8. Notice the reduced reds there.
The whites you see as red are shifted like #F9F9F7. This one, I'd probably call yellow, but you get the point, reduced blues. There's probably a better example pixel in there and I just haven't found it.
The red pixels in the thumbnail, well, maybe JPEG downscaling? I can't say, because I don't know what downscaling algorithm is being used.
So the parts you see as white, are actually bluish white in a sea of blue (Cyan is just mixtures of blue and green in case of RGB) and the part you see as red, are reddish white, in a sea or blue.
Also, for those who don't see red, don't look straight at the image. Look at something near it, with the image in your peripheral vision and you'll get what others are saying. But I guess that happened while you were reading the title.
Here's another version
The poster in the image is the original source for the coke can op posted btw
Fucking pattern recognition...
Pretty sure this is stolen from a Facebook account I follow but I can't remember the name at the moment and will edit it in if I find it
Edit: the account name is Japanese
2nd edit: found it
https://www.facebook.com/share/6U4q8zuJr7usVgtk/?mibextid=qi2Omg
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