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

The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#21

Post by julianwa »

gmaslov wrote: post #14

I was disappointed to read that they gave up the principled modeling approach (the 80-year old German paper mentioned early on in the article) and instead collected 100 data points that "looked good" and interpolated somehow. The article says that the Kubelka-Munk model achieved color mixing that was "too realistic" and therefore difficult to use for the purpose of creating a distinctive brand palette. What this tell…

You're correct in that, for example, purple lies halfway between read an blue in terms of hue. However, an interpolation between those colors based on hue that does not adjust saturation, will look quite ugly, as it passes through magenta, etc. The question is, how should one adjust the saturation?

There's nothing wrong with any given color space. It was designed with particular goals in mind, and those goals generally did not include attractive blending through linear interpolation. So, yes, we developed a means of hand-tuning the interpolation such that it produces colors that look good together, which is what our users really cares about.

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#22

Post by jules »

gmaslov wrote: post #14

I was disappointed to read that they gave up the principled modeling approach (the 80-year old German paper mentioned early on in the article) and instead collected 100 data points that "looked good" and interpolated somehow. The article says that the Kubelka-Munk model achieved color mixing that was "too realistic" and therefore difficult to use for the purpose of creating a distinctive brand palette. What this tell…

Look at it another way. What is the goal of their product? A person should be able to sit down, and draw something. That person has a model in his head of what the drawing should look like. He picks and mixes colors to achieve this according to his intuition. So the goal of the program is to match human intuition, not to match reality. Why would real world paint be the optimal painting tool? The best way to match human intuition is to base the behavior of the program on data collected from human intuition.

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#23

Post by aw3c2 »

sp332 wrote: post #15
aw3c2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CMYK is an subtractive color model, it is not very understandable and definitely not intuitive for human color perception. HSL is much better for that. It all is not too revelant in the end result I think because those are just models and their software exposes certain aspects of colors.

Mixing pigments (ink or paint) can be done in CMYK because it is a subtractive process. It would have been realistic and something that anyone who has played with finger paints or crayons has experienced. (Although I agree that it's not very relevant to the end result, it would have been nice to see it in the discussion.)

Geez, I feel stupid about that comment now. Was too much in the "monitors are RGB, CYMK is only for print" but of course, when mixing colors it might be good indeed.

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#24

Post by mnicole »

alayne wrote: post #9
stevenwei wrote: post #6

Make no mistake, this level of attention to detail is why this app has remained consistently in the top charts since its release.

It's on the charts because it's "free". The overall rating is only 4/5 stars on itunes. They use the annoying model of making you buy tools like color as in app purchases. Notability, which has some similarities, sells for 0.99 without in app purchase nonsense and is rated higher.

The in-app purchases are perfect for this. You get to demo the brushes before you use them to figure out if you even need or like them. They're asking what amounts to what -- $10? for a beautiful app that looks and works worlds better than most in the same arena. I much prefer paying nothing up front and being able to try all of the features and figure out which ones I want to buy. I ended up getting them all simply to support the concept. You cite Notability but I don't want an app that does 20 things, with an ugly/more complex interface to boot. I have other apps that excel at those other things if I need them. I just want a drawing app, and I'm willing to pay a premium for one that offers the best experience for what I'm trying to accomplish with it.

I'm tired of paying for apps up-front only to find that they weren't what I was looking for or what was advertised. Good reviews don't necessarily mean that it is the right tool for the task, and forcing the user to then have to request a refund instead of just having a trial period or a free version they can simply delete is not user-friendly and results in all of the "DO NOT PAY FOR THIS APP!!!!1" and "I WANT A REFUND!" reviews from people who know none-the-wiser (although Apple doesn't make it very clear/easy to do so to begin with) and cause more people to turn away before giving it a shot. It also allows for the developer to be able to persuade initially unsatisfied users with later [demo] releases.

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#27

Post by duopixel »

0x0 wrote: post #2

I wonder if CMYK would be appropriate? The article didn't mention anything about it (even though it talks about how they tried a bunch of other color spaces by name)

CMYK is more intuitive than RGB but still not quite there. It is difficult to grasp that mixing a saturated pinkish color (magenta) with yellow will produce red. On top of that, if you add blue (cyan) it will produce black!

Printer cartridges are highly calibrated for this kind of mixing, if you attempt to do it with acrylics or oils you will get a dirty dark grayish color. This is because different inks have different opacity and reflect light in different ways (as the German research points out).

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#28

Post by duopixel »

tammer wrote: post #17

Anyone know any desktop or web apps with similar functionality? I don't have any iThings and am bored with conventional color pickers.

Color picker for data applies some of the principles mentioned in the article, it's more of a palette generator than a color picker put it produces very good results:

http://tristen.ca/hcl-picker/

Re: The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing

#30

Post by jcl »

archagon wrote: post #20
tammer wrote: post #17

Anyone know any desktop or web apps with similar functionality? I don't have any iThings and am bored with conventional color pickers.

Corel Painter has paint mixing, but I don't know how it compares to Paper's approach.

ArtRage also has a paint layering/mixing model, although I'm guessing it's using neither Kubelka-Munk nor Paper's survey-based approach.

http://www.artrage.com/artrage-studio-features.html

Post reply on HN