VizWorld.com

Color theory is a fascinating field, part mathematics and physics and part human psychology.  Between the two fields, visualization often finds itself stuck trying to sort out tricky issues with Colorbars and shading.  Robert Kosara takes a look at some interesting psychological studies that look to see if the evolution of language has any impact on color perception.

The impact of language and higher-level concepts on visualization is the key to understanding how visualization actually works. Abstract concepts like color, shape, size, etc. seen in isolation elicit associations and embellishments that influence what we see and how we think about it.

These studies get a bit fishy at times: Do we distinguish colors better when they have names, or do we simply find it easier to give them names we already know?  For example, it’s hard to call something “dark blue” without a “light blue” to compare it against?  Nonetheless, these issues are at the heart of many visualization questions.

via You Only See Colors You Can Name | eagereyes.

Graphics color, human vision

The Pixel Farm has released a fun new gadget called ‘AirGrade’ completely free, bringing some of their colour-grading prowess to the masses.  It opens a full world of professional film & TV grading tools to the user, all controllable via a fun iPhone app.

To grade an image using Airgrade, users roll a 3D trackball and rotate a radial wheel on their iPhone to adjust precise tonal ranges using Lift, Gamma, Gain controls – recognised by professional colourists as Shadow, Midtone and Highlights – plus a Saturation control for overall colour intensity. The result appears interactively on their Mac, and on any other connected monitoring device, such as a digital projector. A shake of the iPhone resets the parameters, allowing a fresh grade to be made.

Get the full details after the break.

Read more…

Graphics color, iphone, pixelfarm

If you don’t actually work in the VFX Industry, you may be completely oblivious to the incredible power that ‘color grading’ can wield over a scene.  Be it recorded video or CG footage, the power that a color artist wields in post-production has the capability of changing the entire feel of the footage.

The process of colour grading is something that is used in almost every piece of professional video. Colour grading can take the form of simple colour correction such as correcting white balance, or can be used to give a particular look, e.g., making a scene look warm or cold.

Whilst it is mostly associated with recorded video, it is also something that’s important in motion graphics too. First we’ll take a look at exactly what colour grading is then we’ll look at some of tools you can use to grade your videos.

via An Introduction to Colour Grading | Fuel Your Motionography.

Graphics color, vfx

Over at WeatherSealed, Stephen Von Worley  took the data from the XKCD color survey and plotted it in an interesting new way that shows just how popular various names are used for various colors.

The Color Strata includes the 200 most common color names (excluding black-white-grayish tones), organized by hue horizontally and relative usage vertically, stacked by overall popularity, shaded representatively, and labeled where possible. Besides filtering spam, ignoring cruft, normalizing grey to gray, and correcting the most egregious misspellings (here’s looking at you, fuchsia), the results are otherwise unadulterated. As such, similar color names, like sea green, seafoam green, and seafoam, each appear separately. They’re synonymous… or are they?

If you think that’s neat, then definitely check out his “smoothed” version. Instant Wallpaper Classic.

via The Color Strata – Color Names, Common And Less So, Compared.

Graphics, Science color, survey

XKCD recently ran an interesting web survey of its users about colors.  Simply presenting a color to the user and asking them to name it.  Sounds simple enough, but the results are amazing.  Of course, the sampleset is a bit suspect (geeks who are already Xkcd fans) and self-selected, but the results show not only interesting trends in color perception and human vision, but in the psychology.  Such as:

• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.

You can still view the survey here, but definitely hit his website for some fascinating graphs.

via Color Survey Results « xkcd. via ChartPorn

Science color, survey

Shannon Noack has published an article on how to use color theory in web design. After a quick review of basic terminology, she takes a look at some well known sites to see what colors they used, and what that means to viewers of the site. She takes a look at the White House web site, Amazon, Best Buy, Verizon, and a few others. Overall it is a pretty good read. From the article:

Unarguably one of the most important aspects of any design is its colors. Designers create the style of a site, as well as the movement it makes, the emotion it creates, and its purpose based largely upon the color choices they make. Colors are powerful tools and an important thing all designers should understand when creating websites.

via A Look into Color Theory in Web Design.

Graphics color, web design

Bad Astronomy has posted an article on the topic of star colors today. Phil Plait, the author, found a website that has reduced star colors to hex code and RGB values. As anyone who does visualization for a living knows, the world is a complex place and trying to reduce anything down to a single color gives you a Crayola Land feel. It is tough, when rendering, to get something that looks right, for all sorts of lighting tricks come into play. In the end he has, what I think, is a wonderful conclusion.

I think the real lesson here is that something we think of as simple — color — is not at all simple! The way colors are emitted by an object, the way our eyes detect color, and most importantly the way our brains interpret that signal, are actually extraordinarily complex processes. I think that’s a very important concept to keep in mind when pondering pretty much any issue: what we take for granted as simple is almost never any such thing.

By the way, if we have red, white, and blue stars, why are there no green stars?

via A hex on star colors | Bad Astronomy.

Science color, star

WeatherSealed has an impressive chart showing the evolution of the Crayola Collection of Colors from 1903 to today,as it gre from the original 8 colors to the present 120.

Crayola’s crayon chronology tracks their standard box, from its humble eight color beginnings in 1903 to the present day’s 120-count lineup. According to Crayola, of the precious crayons of my childhood – the seventy-two colors from the official 1975 set – sixty-one survive.

The dialog on his site is hard to follow, but the colors themselves come from both Wikipedia and the Crayola Crayon Chronology.

Color Me A Dinosaur « Weather Sealed. via ChartPorn

Graphics color, crayola, infographic, timeline

This paper is from 2004 but I’m amazed the technology hasn’t appeared in any mainstream tools yet.  The paper presents an algorithm for colorizing greyscale images with amazing detail with only a few rough sketch marks to use as a guide.

In this paper we present a simple colorization method that requires neither precise image segmentation, nor accurate region tracking. Our method is based on a simple premise: neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors. We formalize this premise using a quadratic cost function and obtain an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently using standard techniques. In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

At their website they show colorizing not only photos but video as well with startling accuracy.

via Colorization Using Optimization.

Science algorithm, color, research

Andy Woodruff has developed an interesting algorithm that processes images on Flickr for a specific geographical area and builds a colormap, similar to a heatmap, of the various colors found in that area.

This being a blog about maps, I of course mean Harvard not as a school but as a geographic entity. What color is the landscape, physical and cultural? When people look around at whatever interests them, what colors are they looking at?

Independently mapping the intensity and hue of the various colors, and connecting it with the geo-tagging data for the images, creates some pretty interesting maps.  Still a work-in-progress, but I look forward to seeing where it leads.

via Cartogrammar.com | Blog » Flickr as a paintbrush. via Information Aesthetics

Science color, flickr, geospatial, map