Generating a color spectrum for an image (amandahinton.com)

by evakhoury 11 comments 60 points
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11 comments

[−] loneboat 27d ago
I really like the idea of iteration 7, but I feel like it would work a lot better with some minimum height on the y axis. Letting it peter out to zero loses the "spectrum-ness" of it, and it just looks like various random color blobs. Maybe could have a fixed minimum height, and somehow use saturation to distinguish "truly zero here" from "really low amount here".
[−] MontagFTB 27d ago
Visually the results are very compelling! It also gives an at-a-glance intuition about the image that the bar-style options fail to convey. I am a fan.
[−] Daub 27d ago
This is a very interesting project. As a design teacher, I recommend to my students that they do not employ color swatches for anything other than flat color designs. Certainly for an animation, a photo or a movie such simplified visualizations have little value as they do not convey the kind of ranges information this project is addressing.

That being said, I am certain that there is no 2D method of visualizing such fundamentally 3D information as color.

[−] pixelpoet 27d ago
This will doubtless be an unpopular comment, but the "Do not" imperative at the bottom of the page was super jarring to me. I really don't appreciate random websites trying to tell me what to do in such a direct imperative tone, and would never write like that even if it were my intention; not to mention that it doesn't actually prevent anything.

Pity, because it was a nice article.

[−] pixelpoet 27d ago
(Replying to myself because the above was posted over 2 hours ago)

I was thinking about how I'd go about it, and I think first I'd Hilbert sort the colours in something like OKLab space, then generate a PDF from this using Just Noticeable Diff weights, then sample that PDF using something either uniform regular or golden ratio samples (must be monotonically increasing).

[−] throawayonthe 27d ago
are you referring to "All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. © 2026" ?
[−] pixelpoet 27d ago
Yes, the "Do not" imperative feels so bossy and unnecessary; the people who need to hear it don't care / won't heed it, and the rest of us were directly instructed not to do something (which we weren't even remotely interested in doing anyway) just because we happened to read a blog post all the way to the end.

I know it's a small thing but the tone really does bug me; consider if I would put a trailer to this Honestly Just Another Random Ass Comment On The Internet:

Do not reproduce this comment without permission.

[−] ranger_danger 27d ago
Is there source available for this?
[−] nopakos 27d ago
Iteration 7 would be interesting as a video (for a video).
[−] vessenes 27d ago
I like the final idea, but I think I'd like it better on a log scale -- so many of the colors get basically one or two pixels of height.
[−] orbital-decay 27d ago
Now make it polar and you almost have a vectorscope...