Return to color inventory page
Let’s say you have a photo of a product or a place, and you want to design artwork, packaging, etc. to go with it.
One of the things you can do is make a color inventory. You figure out the main colors in your photo and their proportions, and then you use that information to design your materials with the same colors in the same proportions.
Making a color inventory by hand is a laborious task. As a human, you are fantastic at deciding which colors are the main colors. Figuring out the proportions accurately isn’t so easy. This program, then, is meant to assist you. You point out the colors, and the computer calculates the proportions, because computers are great at doing calculations.
The idea for this program came from Amir Esfahani, who teaches art at Skyline College in San Bruno, CA and is the director of the Artist in Residency program for the Internet Archive. Amir also did the CSS to make the color inventory look nice. David Hornung suggested adding the non-proportional inventory.
*Note: It would be great if a program could automatically derive the color inventory from the photo. However, this is not something that computers are particularly good at. (Unless programmed by someone who knows more about machine learning than I do—which is just about everyone.)