I tried the first illusion again.
I was able to make it look a little more grey, just using some masks and the such, but no matter how I did it they did match. The yellow one remained somewhat yellow, and this may have everything to do with my eyes.
What I decided to do was to blow up the pictures immensly to see what it looked like in full screen scale. At this magnitude of zoom you can see that the yellow one is infact much more grey than it appears from a distance.
So to wrap it up; When the object is very small the grey is filtered out more, which seems to do with surrounding colors. Where as a large image of the center peice the grey is more easily detectable.
Yes they are both grey However they are not exactly the same as the two zoomed images showed me. One is more dominated with blue mixture. And blue is a color that has a frequency that we do not detect very well. The other is grey with yellow mixed in. Yellow is a frequency we detect better.
Which is why I think the color we see is not a false perception of the world. What we see is a very true and real understandable result.
here we compare the two images, unaltered, only increased in size.
