(Palm?) stump with black shelf fungi.

[full_metal_ox]

Taken 4 March 2025 at 16:42 Eastern Standard Time, in the alley behind my apartment complex in full daylight. The adjacent utility pole (a sliver of the line is visible in the upper left corner) is probably the reason the tree was felled.



This one is a study in complex crunchy textures and value and hue variations of grey and gray. (Though extremely muted, it’s not achromatic, being mottled with the faintest tinges of yellow, brown, and green:

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Ah, what a lovely range! I can picture the magic of capillary action transporting all the good fluids and nutrients through that lacy network.

The iColorPalette.com site is intriguing! How do you use it?

[full_metal_ox]

Warning: this is going to be an attempt to Explain It Like You’re Five, coming from someone who is:

(A) both Terminally Online and painfully tech-uneducated: my cyberhousebreaking has been a process of trial and error and error and error, and

(B) a pompous exposition looking for someone to happen to. My advance apologies for any condescension or regaling you with my braying ignorance—-which will not be deliberate (and let me know if I commit such.) Note further that my own experience is on an IPad via Safari; your mileage may vary.

https://icolorpalette.com/color-palette-from-images

Okay; you either upload an image from your device with the “Upload Image” bar at the upper left of the sample image (a shelf of brilliantly colored fabric bolts forming vertical stripes) or enter a URL in the “Enter image url” box to the upper right and click on the “Go” button to its right. An oval will begin pulsing in the center of the sample image before resolving into the image you entered, with a palette to its right of five colors randomly pulled from the image:



(Sometimes the site will just keep interminably loading without yielding anything, and there’s nothing for it but to wait for the finicky fit to pass.)

If you’re not satisfied with the results, there are two ways you can adjust the palette. The black “Shuffle” button below the image at left will produce another randomized combination; to hand-pick a color from the image, touch or click on one of the palette color swatches; when a dark border frames the swatch, a white banner reading “Click & drag over the image to select color.” will appear at the top of the image. You can then click upon or touch the specific part of the image you want to pick. (If the Click & drag banner is in the way of the space you want to click, you can touch the X at its upper right to dispel it.)

Once you have the palette you want, pressing the “Collage” button second from left will give you a choice of viewing or downloading the palette image (which will be in PNG.).The third button, “Download”, doesn’t seem to work on my device in any of the formats offered, and the fourth, “Save Palette—Save to Cloud”, is something I prefer not to do.

Beneath that row of buttons, in bold, it says,

“Download 59 Colors to one file

Download Colors extracted from image to one file. Available formats Adobe Photoshop swatch - ACO , Adobe swatch exchange - ASE, Portable Document Format - PDF and Image color card.”

Beneath the above text are four more black buttons, and beneath those is a palette of (usually) 59 colors auto-picked from the image you entered; the Shuffle and hand-picking functions do not affect the selection. (The default selection is a palette of colors from the sample image; every now and then it’ll glitch to display the colors from your image below those from the sample image. Note also that a very simple image may yield fewer than 59 colors.)

The first button from the left is “PDF”, which will generate the palette in PDF but, depending on your device, may not automatically download it; the second, “Image Color Card”, will download the palette in PNG; the third, “Photoshop ACO”, and fourth, “Adobe ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange)” involve services and formats I don’t use and that don’t work on my device.



(Image description: eight senior specimens of Homo sapiens var. euroamericanus in a grassy park setting in warm weather, seated in lawn chairs beneath a white banner reading, “OLD COOTS GIVING ADVICE. It’s probably bad advice, but it’s free.” Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/old-coots-giving-advice-they-call-themselves-old-coots-and-they-have-some-advice-for-you/)

Wow, that's epic information

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for this carefully composed answer.

I'm sorry to admit, this raises another question: what can one do with that knowledge? Seeing the palette did help provide insight into what makes the photo gratifying: monochromatic at first glance yet harboring a subtle panoply of shades.

The two formats neither of us use -- AVO and ASE -- are inputs to full-color image/design software. I guess if I was tasked with making a point-of-purchase display for my palm wine cooler drinks, I might use the palette from your great pic as a starting point.

Do you use the summary info that iPalette provides as an input to another process?

Re: Wow, that's epic information

[full_metal_ox]

Do you use the summary info that iPalette provides as an input to another process?

For a number of processes; color happens to be a lifelong Special Interest™ of mine—-from occult tables of correspondences to my own synaesthetic associations to Johannes Itten’s ruminations on the character of color to 80’s seasonal color typing—-and I enjoy deducing and perusing color schemes for their own sake. (I didn’t do a palette for the iguana because my phone camera didn’t capture the full vibrance of his color, even after applying a saturation filter, nor the complexity of his patterning at the fairly low resolution I achieved. Note furthermore that in the blazing overhead tropical midday sunlight, I can barely see what I’m doing.)

One thing you can use colorpicking for is personal style choices, by running a picture of yourself through the process to determine what colors you’re made of, and therefore why one brown or navy or pink looks borrowed and another mysteriously makes sense of your hair and eyes and skin tone. (I don’t let my likeness or government name anywhere near my blogging platforms, but I was surprised to discover the level of gray and green in not only my hair and eyes but my skin.)

Using a palette of muted grays and greens would further a relaxing context for your palm wine coolers, in shaded rather than air-conditioned cool; if you wanted to present them as a vivacious party beverage, you’d probably want to crank up the saturation to lime and chartreuse, and throw in some hibiscus red and Horny Iguana Orange.

(So why didn’t I do a palette for the iguana? Because my phone camera didn’t capture the full vibrance of his color, even after applying a saturation filter, nor the complexity of his patterning at the fairly low resolution I achieved. Note furthermore that in the blazing overhead tropical midday sunlight, I can barely see what the expletive deleted I’m doing.)

Re: Wow, that's epic information

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for introducing me to Johannes Itten -- this PDF offers the basic outline of his seven-point color theory.. It's a very useful framework.