Here’s Why This Black and White Photo Is Going Viral, and People Are Seeing It in Color

Some black and white photos have been going viral all of the sudden, and it seems to be because people are seeing them in color. Over on Twitter, the photos began making the rounds, due to the optical illusion-like nature of their visuals. The photos are technically black and white images, but have colored grids across them, which give our brains the perception of colored photographs.

Twitter user Øyvind Kolås explained the illusion: “The image for the post is a visual/artistic experiment playing with simultanous contrast resulting from other experiments these days. An over-saturated colored grid overlayed on a grayscale image causes the grayscale cells to be perceived as having color.”

The trick is very interesting and can also be done with uniform lines or dots as well. Many people have since taken to social media to comment on the illusion, which is truly mind-blowing.

“The blue and green are particularly impressive,” one person tweeted.

“The closer the lines are, the harder it is for your brain to distinguish the color and non color areas. It is not that your brain is filling in the color,” another commenter offered.

“For some reason it doesn’t work [with] the red for me like it does with the other colours,” someone else wrote. “yellow and oranger are weaker, while the green and (especially) blue are quite strong. Interesting.

“It works pretty well except for the red,” one other user echoed. “Might be just me but I can clearly see the red lines on a grey background.”

“Why are some colors more suggestible than others? I see two t-shirts that are clearly lime green, but the intense red grid does very little for the gray shirts beneath,” a fifth curious person said. “I’m not colorblind – does the brain fill in cool colors more easily than warm ones?”

Photo Credit: Øyvind Kolås