It's certainly worth its price but I wonder how many people would pay for it. Nice work! I like the design.
Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#22Is there anything to covert hex codes to paint colors? Live, real word paint on the wall. That would be neat. I haven't looked at a paint can in a while, maybe it's as simple as rgb?
There are multiple standards for this.
- RAL – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAL_colour_standard
- Pantone – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone
- some others, often with military roots (FS595, British Standard, …)
Pantone has different charts for paper/textile prints etc. RAL is mostly used for paint. It's common to have RAL codes on spray cans or wall paint buckets here in Europe.
There are tools to approximately convert RGB (and HSL and others) to these colors, eg. http://rgb.to/. But since the color models and intended use are different, there are some colors with no equivalent.
Pantone even provides RGB/CMYK mappings for applicable colors in their sample books: https://www.pantone.com/images/pages/19890/Pantone-Extended-...
There are also palletes for graphics software like Adobe Illustrator. But some colors look weird on the RGB display obviously.
(Source: i worked as a backpack designer for years, we did a lot of pantone prints)
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#23What a great idea. I am renovating my house right now and I have to buy some paint for partially painting a facade. I could use such an app to be able to choose the paint color, in the store, as close as possible to the original one. Do you know of any such app for Android?
Beware the effects of incident lighting on colour perception. As a human, you do a lot of processing you're not even aware of to normalise the colours you perceive. Cameras cannot do this (without calibration), so if the incandescent/flourescent/daylight/sunlight mix and intensity is different in the store to your house, you could end up with a very different shade.
It's really interesting. My wife and I have done lots of painting at our house over the past year and we never get exactly what we expected. Most recently, we spent a long time selecting a light gray, which looked very much gray with a group of other grays. Then we painted the first portion of wall, stepped back and both said, "well, that is blue".
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a RNN that makes up plausible names based on a training set of actual colors. I kinda hope that was a genuinely curious question and not an arrogant rhetoric one.
Why RNN? I would probably settle for a nearest neighbour in Lab color space.
Because I'm no data scientist but I somewhat understand that a RNN can extrapolate a training set. Nearest neighbors are cool too!
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#25Hi, HN!
Really excited to share my little project here. Being a colorblind designer, it was often hard for me to figure the color names and decide which colors to use. Hence, I decided to make this app.
Cone lets you pick colors in real time using the phone's camera. It lets you build color palettes while on the run, capturing and recording color for later comment/discussion, sending the colors to someone else quickly and efficiently, and of course translating a physical objects color to a usable set of information without having to get expensive colorimetric equipment.
Really excited to hear feedback from you all :)
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beware the effects of incident lighting on colour perception. As a human, you do a lot of processing you're not even aware of to normalise the colours you perceive. Cameras cannot do this (without calibration), so if the incandescent/flourescent/daylight/sunlight mix and intensity is different in the store to your house, you could end up with a very different shade.
It's really interesting. My wife and I have done lots of painting at our house over the past year and we never get exactly what we expected. Most recently, we spent a long time selecting a light gray, which looked very much gray with a group of other grays. Then we painted the first portion of wall, stepped back and both said, "well, that is blue".
I'm guessing you looked at the paint in the shop under artificial lighting (which is more orange - making blues look more grey), then painted it in your house where there is more bluer daylight!
Always buy the extortionately priced test samples. It's worth it!
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#27Is there anything to covert hex codes to paint colors? Live, real word paint on the wall. That would be neat. I haven't looked at a paint can in a while, maybe it's as simple as rgb?
It's definitely not as simple as RGB. Displays use an additive color model (you start from black and add more light), whereas paints use a subtractive color model (you start from white and add pigment). The standard model for subtractive color is CMYK -- cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Calibrating RGB displays to offer a reasonable preview of CMYK color is quite tricky due to the completely different color space and…
Neither is a good fit of describing colours in the real world, as they're dependent on the output device (in case of CMYK both the printer and the paper change the resulting colour). So a mapping of paints to CMYK or RGB would be rather meaningless.
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#28Is there anything to covert hex codes to paint colors? Live, real word paint on the wall. That would be neat. I haven't looked at a paint can in a while, maybe it's as simple as rgb?
I am currently working on a feature which will show the closest matching Pantone colors to the captured color (which is calculated in the LAB color space for high accuracy). Would that fit your use case?
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#29Question here, how do you put a name on the hex? Do you have a database that map each hex code to "limelight", "grey asparagus", etc ?
I am using a database with Resene color names (and some names from the Wikipedia colors list) mapped to specific hex codes.
I find the closest hex code from the database to the one in your camera and show the name associated with it.
Hope that answers your question!
Re: Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's definitely not as simple as RGB. Displays use an additive color model (you start from black and add more light), whereas paints use a subtractive color model (you start from white and add pigment). The standard model for subtractive color is CMYK -- cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Calibrating RGB displays to offer a reasonable preview of CMYK color is quite tricky due to the completely different color space and…
Neither is a good fit of describing colours in the real world, as they're dependent on the output device (in case of CMYK both the printer and the paper change the resulting colour). So a mapping of paints to CMYK or RGB would be rather meaningless.
That's certainly true. But CMYK would be more useful because the commonly used CMYK spaces can represent a color gamut that's closer to the range of shades in the actual paints, whereas the commonly used RGB spaces are too limited. (A regular color printer can print a substantial range of colors that are aliased when represented in sRGB, i.e. you can't distinguish them on screen unless the preview is adjusted to compensate. This also happens the other way: many on-screen greens can't be printed without extra inks.)