Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

colornames.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 237 posts

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#21

Post by js2 »

roel_v wrote: post #15
bb2018 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are zero people who cannot tell two colors apart, they should have the same name. If there is at least one person who cannot tell two colors apart, they should have different names.

What does 'telling a color apart' even mean? I did a mini project some time ago, where I basically did some custom color quantization (it was to reduce an image into a configurable amount of discrete colors, to make a pixel quilt with a manageable amount of distinct fabric colors). So I used CieLAB colors to calculate the 'visual distance' between the available colors and then recursively merged colors until I got to…

> What does 'telling a color apart' even mean?

Being able to distinguish colors on a test such as https://xritephoto.com/cool-tools

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#22

Post by nirui »

picdit wrote: post #3

A few of my favorites so far: Screaming Grey: #AAAAAA It's Still Basically Black: #000001 Nice: #696969 (lol) These would make for some great candidates: https://colors.lol/ ;)

BTW, that "Nice Cyan" (#006969) is actually really nice (at least to me), I can imagine myself building a website/app with that color theme.

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#23

Post by projektfu »

purple-again wrote: post #2

Very first thing I see is a rule that the names must be non offensive and the second thing I see is the color orange named after Trump. Apparently not a very serious attempt.

Trump does make an effort to be orange. It’s sort of a trade mark like John Deere green.

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#24

Post by perennate »

kccqzy wrote: post #5

I can't see this succeeding at all. Randall Munroe tried something similar and the results weren't encouraging: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ > People are primed by the colors they saw previously, which adds overall noise and some biases to the data and > Moreover, monitors vary; RGB is not an absolute color space

I think it's just for fun. After all, the top name for black (#000000) is Lil Huddy (https://colornames.org/color/000000).

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#25

Post by Galanwe »

Firerouge wrote: post #18
roel_v wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does 'telling a color apart' even mean? I did a mini project some time ago, where I basically did some custom color quantization (it was to reduce an image into a configurable amount of discrete colors, to make a pixel quilt with a manageable amount of distinct fabric colors). So I used CieLAB colors to calculate the 'visual distance' between the available colors and then recursively merged colors until I got to…

I think in the case of telling two colors apart, it's can be as simple as presenting them side by side, and seeing if someone can distinguish a difference.

Not sure that is so simple unfortunately.

First, because if I recursively apply your argument, then no color would have a name. Starting from the very 1st lowest color frequency and the 2nd right next to it, no-one could differentiate them. Apply the same logic between the 2nd and the 3rd, the 3rd and the 4th, etc.

So you cannot apply this argument to "any" color pair. You would have to define a set of starting colors, and always do the comparison against them. Now you enter the problem of which starting colors to starts, and the fact that using any pre-existing color names would most likely not be evenly distributed on the color spectrum.

Second, it wouldn't work because color recognition is not a transitive process.

- If you show me two very close red variations side by side, I may not be able to tell the difference.

- If you space the variation, I may be able to tell that there are 2 different reds, but wouldn't be able to tell which one is darker/lighter accurately.

- If instead of showing me the two close reds side by side, you show them to me paired with an other color, I may be able to tell the difference. For instance, show me a board with half red1 + yellow, and an other board with red2 + yellow. I may spot than 1 of the red + yellow is matching that good compared to the other one.

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#26

Post by dingdong3 »

purple-again wrote: post #2

Very first thing I see is a rule that the names must be non offensive and the second thing I see is the color orange named after Trump. Apparently not a very serious attempt.

What are you talking about? TDS is very very real and very very serious. You can say anything negative about him here too but anything positive becomes political and gets removed by the intellectual mods.

Re: Colornames.org – A collaborative effort to name all 16.7M colors

#30

Post by xipho »

kccqzy wrote: post #5

I can't see this succeeding at all. Randall Munroe tried something similar and the results weren't encouraging: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ > People are primed by the colors they saw previously, which adds overall noise and some biases to the data and > Moreover, monitors vary; RGB is not an absolute color space

2000 suggestions a hour seems like a success to me.
Post reply on HN