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

toneyalexander.github.io

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

#11

Post by vermarish »

This is beautiful work! First, I thought this would involve using PCA to go from 3D to 2D, which would result in an easier selector to use, but at the expense of representing every person.

Then, I thought this would stop at using the U-space vectors (the ones that form the basis of the PCA image) and their corresponding ellipse to form our color space, but no, the function fitting is a very slick idea, even if it was executed by hand.

Lastly, I love the presentation of sampling from different r values. Whether you sample from a fixed r value or a range of r values, I bet this has great applications in game design or animation.

I still don't quite get the manual data labeling process at the beginning? It seems like it would encode some bias, but the consistency of the first point cloud and the results certainly speak for themselves.

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

#12

Post by automatoney »

andai wrote: post #7

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.)

Yes absolutely right on - I mention much deeper in the page that in a picker UI you can use a bigger range, but that in a generation context you might want to be a bit more selective. I go into it a bit more when I explain what R^2 is.

"not sure if there's a way to solve that problem without excluding some real colors too" - 100% right on that too. A big part of this work was to define a way to tweak/improve the equations in order to approach a solution to these issues - part of my hope in sharing is to get more eyes and brains thinking about this and proposing improvements!

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

#15

Post by wongarsu »

andai wrote: post #7

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.)

If you drag the bottom slider all the way to the right you only have plausible skin tones. Drag it all the way to the right and you can match skin tones for orcs, Na'vi and djinn

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

#16

Post by automatoney »

vermarish wrote: post #11

This is beautiful work! First, I thought this would involve using PCA to go from 3D to 2D, which would result in an easier selector to use, but at the expense of representing every person. Then, I thought this would stop at using the U-space vectors (the ones that form the basis of the PCA image) and their corresponding ellipse to form our color space, but no, the function fitting is a very slick idea, even if it was…

Thank you! I call out the manual labeling bias and also that a future work improvement would be to be scientific about that labeling process (multiple labelers, expert labelers), and then to feed that into the equation generation steps. Part of where the "good enough" naming comes from - I was hoping that using my art brain and keeping a bunch of reference images in mind (shout out to the Humanae project) would maybe offset the bias a bit. But 100% right on the bias being there.

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

#17

Post by automatoney »

stephantul wrote: post #14

Love it. I especially thought the introspective “aside” section on related resources was great, and I wish more people would show this kind of reflection.

Thanks! I hope to send lots of love those ways, they're basically all things that I found outside of this work that I liked enough to remember (I think Humanae was the one that I found while doing this).

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

#20

Post by richiebful1 »

andai wrote: post #7

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.)

Reducing the R^2 value to ~1.5 excludes skin colors that are extremely blue, green and purple. That seems to be a happy medium between including real outliers and excluding colors like green.
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