Generating a color spectrum for an image

(amandahinton.com)

53 points | by evakhoury 3 days ago

8 comments

  • loneboat 22 hours 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".
  • pixelpoet 14 hours 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 11 hours 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 14 hours ago
      are you referring to "All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. © 2026" ?
      • pixelpoet 11 hours 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.

  • Daub 17 hours 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.

  • MontagFTB 1 day 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.
  • nopakos 18 hours ago
    Iteration 7 would be interesting as a video (for a video).
  • vessenes 19 hours 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.
  • ranger_danger 23 hours ago
    Is there source available for this?
  • orbital-decay 23 hours ago
    Now make it polar and you almost have a vectorscope...