| On This Page |
|---|
Shirley Wu is a self-described award winning creative focused on data-driven art. While perusing her personal website, one particular visualization stood out to me.
This is the build in Shirley's own words.
Ever since graduating college, I've made it a goal to travel abroad at least once a year. Over the years, I've accumulated almost 4000 images over the course of 13 trips. I've taken those pictures and extracted the five primary colors from each, for a total of roughly 20,000 colors.
I find idea of plotting the dominant colors present in photos to be both creative and nostalgic. Motivated, I decided to create my very photo color wheel.
Here, I outline the procedure to make a photo color wheel. I'll also include possible customizations.
Vanilla Procedure
There are roughly four steps involved in creating a photo color wheel.
- Select Photos
- Identify Dominant Colors
- Plot on a Make-Shift Color Space
- Add Labels
In plain English, we start off by collecting photos from a particular trip. Since we're extracting the dominant colors, there is no need to be picky here---anything and everything should be included! From there, we need to identify the dominant colors present in each photo. It turns out that ''dominant colors'' are not very well defined, so there is some creative flexibility here. Finally, we plot each of these colors on a color space of our choosing. Optionally, we can add labels representing key demarcations (i.e. days, changes in scenery, etc) present in the photos.
Customizations
As mentioned above, there is a lot of opportunity to experiment with different approaches to extract the dominant colors present in each photo. Here, I make use of the convert method implemented in the Python Imaging Library. Discussion online suggests that it internally uses a variant of K-Means Clustering to produce a color pallete.
Just about a year ago, my family and I visited India to celebrate a cousin's wedding. From preparation to execution, the whole event took up 5 days. Here, I cobbled together all the photos I could and made the following color wheel.
As noted above, this is great for album covers, posters, and even Instagram stories!