Create Imressionistic Color Palettes with PhotoChrome.io
PhotoChrome.io is a color resource for designers, developers, or the just plain curious.
Jinnan Zhang and I have been tinkering with an idea for making word-derived color palettes by sampling colors from mashed up photos. By searching tagged images, then melting them into a single impressionistic image, you can squeeze out a color palette that is some sort-of consensus around the color of words.
Inspirations
A few years ago I cobbled together a manual process for picking out a color from a keyword search by hijacking Google image search “quilts.” I recently learned that it wasn’t as much of an original thought as I had assumed. And Andy Woodruff has done some beautiful work around sampling geo-tagged images to paint in map hues here and here.
Because we are blending many images together, the more vibrant hues tend to get muted -but the overall palette still tends to make sense. I can rationalize this really quickly since designers (including cartographers) tend to work in much more muted colors than you might expect.
How It Works
Unsplash is a beautiful, free, photo service. PhotoChrome.io reaches out to their search results, and blends the photographs into a single image. Then Color Thief picks out the dominant hues, and Chroma.js fits them along a brightness gradient, so they are more applicable to data visualization.
Beneath each PhotoChrome palette is the set of component images blended together to make the impressionistic image. You can crop them as you like to pull color out from specific parts of a photo -PhotoChrome will re-build the palette. Also, you can push and pull the saturation of the blended image, to re-paint the palette with sometimes-surprising results.
Painterly
While the color palette is the goal, I like ogling the blended images. They lend me a little sense of how an impressionist's eye might see light and hue, or how a cubist painter sees multiple perspectives at once. Here are some examples:
"Market"
"Roof"
"Cathedral"
"Village"
Anyway, I hope you find some use for PhotoChrome in your paint selection, cartographic endeavors, or graphic design. Or, I hope you just enjoy it without any sense of utility.
Visit PhotoChrome.io
GIS Manager at Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy | IMAGIN Board of Directors
5 个月John Nelson trying to track this down. Did this move or get shut down? The URL isn't working for me anymore. Thanks!
Senior Product Designer
8 年Really interesting John! Looking forward to playing with it.
Re-designing the integration of data and constituent experiences. CSPO Geospatial Cloud Innovation.
8 年Great tool. It makes me think about the way we tag images, I did not always get the types of images I expected. I like the saturation and copy hex / rgb values features.