Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

Hello HN!

I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy.

I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has.

The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for others as I have found it! There's lots of room for improvements (see the Future Work section), but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
toneyalexander.github.io

This is super cool! I have always loved projects that try to categorize color space. Usually my work has gone in the other direction - isGray, isCloseToWhite, isPastel - but it's the same insofar as it's defining shapes like your matplot visual.

Wish I had this on hand like this three or four years ago when I was working on VR avatar software - we had hard-coded skin tone options at the time - would have been a cool addition!

In sharing this around I've found more people than I thought who've done things to semantically chop up the color space - definitely a more interesting area than I first thought of when working on my narrow use case. Feels like it'd be fun to play with something that has a whole bunch of different regions of color space labeled - like "here's where IsPastel overlaps with IsGreen".

But absolutely the hope is that this is a tool that stays accessible to people for whatever they're building and everyone can slow down on reinventing the wheel here for every character creator/digital art application.

Nice. Most of these colors look right to me, but I'm also seeing green, blue and purple? If you're curating colors from the space manually then it's not a problem.

"Only realistic colors" would be a different problem. And I'm not sure if there's a way to solve that problem without excluding some real colors too.

(Maybe if the colour selector was a different shape? I don't know much about color spaces.)

Seems to underrepresent pale skin tone variety