The Peagle - Is the beak Yellow or Gray? Explained

We posed the question on facebook, is the beak Gray or Yellow? Below is the breakdown of the answer.

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gray or yellow prosper football beak of the peagle
An earlier draft of the program cover for the Prosper Eagles Football team.

We all saw the infamous Blue or Gold dress that made it’s way around the internet a year or so ago right? Some people looked at it and swore it was blue, while others would have bet their house that it was gold. As I was preparing the artwork that we photographed for the cover of the Prosper Eagles Football team 2018 program, I found myself in a similar debate. 

The beak is still yellow in this one, could you change it to the gray one?

This was a question that I was asked over and over again as I kept sending in the finished artwork for the cover of this year’s Prosper Football Program. I was puzzled. I thought to myself “It is gray, there is no color in it at all?” There is actually another version of the logo as well that I had first used that is a pure, very bright yellow. So I thought this must have been what they were talking about. But wait, I changed it to the gray one very clearly? Or so I thought. 

Turns out that the beak of the logo was being seen differently depending on who looked at it. 

(found on internet) Remember the Blue dress? Was it Blue? Was it Gold?

What did people see?

I posted a poll on our Facebook business page and asked people to tell us, is the beak Gray or is it yellow to you? As of the time of this writing the results were with 94 people voting, 68 saw it as gray/silver and 26 saw it as Gold/Yellow. So yes, there are people that saw the beak as gray and some as yellow. Surprisingly (or not really surprisingly), more people saw the beak for the color gray, just like more people saw the dress as blue. Seeing it in the other color is the abnormal view. 

Even more interesting is this. 

Do you see that little glyph in the beak that is representing a shine of light on the beak of his nose? If you can see in the above photo where that is knocked out and you can see behind it the slightly faded blue behind it of the sky. When I took this same exact photo, and simply filled in that part of the beak with white, and a white outline in the face of the Peagle, the results of what people saw changed dramatically, with almost everyone seeing it as gray. Weird right?

A similar thing happened when I showed people the same exact logo, but sent it as just the logo by itself for them to view. They all saw it as gray. So what does this tell us?

Prosper Eagles Senior Football program cover for 2018 photos by Jeff Dietz
Does seeing this version change your mind on what you see if the beak is yellow or gray?

Why do people see it differently?

Here is where I am going to be very honest with you. I looked up trying to find the scientific reasons for this, but it was written so amazingly complicated that I decided not to include. But you can do a google search for it as it pertains to the dress. From what I could gather, the same exact thing is happening here as I described above. 

I am going to try and explain it from the mind of a photographer. 

So basically, the color and how we see it can play tricks on us, depending on the other colors that are also around the thing that we are looking at. This is why the results changed once I changed the colors that were around it. 

The blue color that was near the cut out areas of the beak and face was causing people to see the gray beak as yellow. They swear up and down that it has a yellow cast to it. Others thought that the beak must be semi-transparent which is causing the blue to come through. But this isn’t true, it’s 100% solid. 

Ok Jeff so what is the real answer? Was it Gray or was it yellow?

So yes, there is an answer. Going to our trusty Photoshop and using the color selection tool (click to zoom in on the photo), you can see that we get the exact same color selection on both of them. This is of course because they are the same color. WHICH IS GRAY!

We can see this further by the color selection tool showing us that our Red, Green and Blue channels are almost all to the number 120, which indicates a gray tone. 

So there you have it folks. That beak is Gray!

I hope that everyone had a bit of fun with that, which was it’s intention and not to drive people crazy. I noticed it while editing and sending it to a few people, and it took me a bit to figure it out. My thought was, “I have to post this and see if others see it or not!”

Tons of fun and a bit of a break from all the awesome photos that I have been posting. 

In a day or two, look for another upcoming blog post where you can see the final version of the Prosper Eagles Football program cover. Of course in less than a week, you will be able to come to a game and buy a copy of the program for yourself!