After Image of Mona Lisa

April 13, 2006 5:46 PM

I'm looking for this optical illusion image. It's the one where you stare at the center of the image for 30 seconds then close your eyes and an after image of the Mona Lisa will magically appear to you. Does anyone have a link to this image?

This is for a report I'm doing. I first saw this optical illusion in a little illusion book I had. I looked all over the internet but couldn't find anything.

posted by SDAnder to media & arts (6 comments total)

Closest I can get you is Jesus.
posted by kookoobirdz at 5:51 PM on April 13, 2006

Google images gives a promising result... but the page it links to is history
posted by logicpunk at 5:56 PM on April 13, 2006

It's easy enough to make such a thing if you have a normal image of the Mona Lisa and pretty much any reasonable graphics editor. "Invert" is a standard function, and that's all you have to do. I just created this.

It works better if you look at a featureless wall or a white piece of paper afterwards than if you close your eyes.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:58 PM on April 13, 2006

Is it one of these?
posted by Gator at 6:00 PM on April 13, 2006

If you wanted to make one more like those Gator posted, you'd probably want to run something like a Gaussian blur over the inverted image, and then posterise it to just two or three colours and maybe tidy up the result a bit.

Then you can add in spurious small scale detail to mislead you when you look at it straight off but which will not be visible in the after image.

I'll see if I can get anywhere going from SCDB's image.
posted by edd at 1:45 AM on April 14, 2006

Try this
posted by edd at 1:56 AM on April 14, 2006