SK8R43, Your brain automatically interprets colors in comparison to the surroundings to find out the local color. It's why you can tell this piece of wood's local color is white, when its actual representation in color is in fact a bunch of blues on the left image, and a bunch of oranges of the right image (and many other subtle colors btw):
However, if you were to depict an image by it's local color alone, you'd get a very naive image. Color is very much dependent on the surroundings. It's also why the following optical illusion works. The arrow points at nearly identical colors, but your brain interprets it differently because of the surrounding colors.
A question that's often asked by people who want to paint skin for example is what color they should use. The answer is, it depends. There are certain local colors that are part of the entire structure, but how they look changes under different lighting settings.Here's another image of the guy who did the illusion above, painting a face in white light and painting a face with various other lights set up. The right is obviously a pretty extreme lighting set up, but it works nonetheless. And even in the left there's some colors creeping in, like on the sides on the top of his head there's a slightly blue-ish tint.
What they've done in the OP is just change the entire image's color and values around, but that proves little more than the fact that they just changed the colors and values around. It's not proof of anything.
Hopefully this sort of answers your questions.