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A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

https://codepen.io/meodai/full/zdgXJj/
168•BlankCanvas•5d ago

Comments

billyp-rva•5h ago
It's always struck me as odd how there are so many off-white colors in HTML/CSS compared to the rest of the space.
WillAdams•5h ago
Vagaries of monitor technology and a lack of calibration/the difficulty of calibrating for lighter colours.
PaulHoule•5h ago
You mean all the low-saturation colors you see around the diagonal?
tocs3•5h ago
I think that is hat was meant and I wonder about that also.

Adding:

Looking some more I think it would be nice if the rotation could be stopped.

Labeling the axis would be nice also.

billyp-rva•5h ago
When you switch the list to show just HTML/CSS colors, it's all the colors in the corner.
kazinator•4h ago
Because there are so many off white colors in wall paint.
layer8•3h ago
That’s because standard RGB is linear while human perception is closer to logarithmic.
Eric_WVGG•5h ago
I use a similar app called Name That Color — https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#6195ED

I like sharing descriptive names with designers instead of naming everything "light blue" "dark blue" "not quite as light but still not dark blue" etc.

This new thing is tons of fun but seems a bit less practically useful.

chime•5h ago
You just reminded me that my app turned 18 a few months ago.

Another dev, Daniel Flück, extended the app to help color blind users: https://www.color-blindness.com/color-name-hue/

extraduder_ire•5h ago
Neat seeing the different shapes the RGB space gets compressed into if you select a different colourspace on the bottom right.
phdelightful•5h ago
What coordinate in the space is furthest from any named color? It looks like there are some relatively large voids in the blue/purple boundary area but it’s hard to say.
madcaptenor•4h ago
Here's the list of colors it works off of: https://github.com/meodai/color-names/blob/main/src/colornam...

I'm trying to figure it out.

madcaptenor•4h ago
For Euclidean distance it seems to be in the neighborhood of (59, 250, 60) which is a bright green, although of course Euclidean distance is not perceptual distance. The blue at (57, 42, 214) also is up there.
turtletontine•4h ago
perceptual distance is quite different from Euclidean distance in this RGB space. Like if put two swaths of color side by side and said “how similar are these?” to samples of people, the groupings would not much resemble this cube.

They’ve done this! It’s shown on a “chromaticity diagram”, and is useful for comparing what colors different screens/printers/etc can reproduce. (It’s 2D not 3D cause it’s normalized for luminance or brightness.) Color science is weirdly fascinating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space?wprov=sfti1#

adzm•4h ago
You can choose other color spaces here which is neat and helps visualize this a bit more accurately.
Etheryte•5h ago
Wish there was a way to make it stop spinning, it's practically impossible to figure out adjacent colors because everything keeps moving no matter what you do. Perhaps there is a way, but I didn't find it?
whatsupdog•4h ago
Same. So annoying.
graypegg•4h ago
https://codepen.io/graypegg/full/XJXoxYB

Only change is lines 421 + 422 that sloooowly rotated the cube are commented out in the javascript, otherwise should act the same!

kazinator•4h ago
I like the view into the black corner toward white. From that aspect, the black-white axis looks like an atmospheric effect, and the blacks appear as if they were opaque objects balls suspended in front of an illuminated fog.
ajsnigrutin•4h ago
Oh yes, i also use the "Graphical 80's sky" when describing my car color. (#0000fc)
layer8•4h ago
Very nice! But there is no option to show color labels?
arichard123•4h ago
Xkcd Colour names based on a survey: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
madcaptenor•40m ago
My favorite bit of this survey (scroll down to "Miscellaneous") is that one of the color names in the raw data set is "unsure-whether-boy-or-girl baby room color". My daughter's room is this color - we painted before she was born. They told us we were going to have a boy but they misread the ultrasound.
markburns•3h ago
Can anyone explain the kind of dense cloud in the middle? Is that down to human perception? We don't give names to things we can't perceive uniquely?
allenu•3h ago
It's probably just aesthetics. Those colors are more commonly used in illustration and design, so they tend to get labeled. There might be some perception involved in there as well as it's easier for our eyes to pick apart the more pastel colors from each other than the darker colors from each other.
csmoak•2h ago
i would expect the more dense part to be the smaller gamut that can be made with paint since we've been naming those colors for a lot longer than the larger gamut that can be made with a screen. The paint/print gamut looks kinda like the more dense parts of these scatter plots within the larger sRGB cube (though the paint gamut isn't entirely contained within sRGB).
vardump•3h ago
Is there a tool that can dither to named colors?
dougb5•3h ago
Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors.

I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1 (It also lets you see the words evoked by the color and vice versa, which was a fun LLM-driven analysis.)

Tempest1981•1h ago
And how far things have come since the X11 color names
Peteragain•2h ago
What is interesting to me is the blank spaces for various naming systems. Ornithologist's view (Ridgway) versus Japanese traditional. Reminds me of the discussion of the blue/green distinction by Kay etc al.
CobrastanJorji•2h ago
Neat!

Feature request: I want the name of the color I'm hovering over to pop up next to the color. I don't want to have to look in the top left to see the name, especially with the board spinning. Also, I want the specific circle I'm hovering over to get a bit bigger so that I can see its exact color better and know that I've selected it.

rezmason•2h ago
Bravo! I love color and color spaces.

I've been researching the way classic Macs quantize colors to limited palettes:

https://rezmason.net/retrospectrum/color-cube

This cube is the "inverse table" used to map colors to a palette. The animated regions are tints and shades of pure red, green, and blue. Ideally, this cube would be a voronoi diagram, but that would be prohibitively expensive for Macs of the late eighties. Instead, they mapped the palette colors to indices into the table, and expanded the regions assigned to those colors via a simultaneous flood fill, like if you clicked the Paint Bucket tool with multiple colors in multiple places at the same time. Except in 3D.

wormius•1h ago
Is the initial setting (Color Name List) a list of ALL the colors in each "sub" category listed in the drop menu?

If so, would it be possible to put a "namespace" in front (like html.violet, or html::violet). That way you see which source it's from? That way you know where it's from (though I realize this may cause multiple "hits" on the same value/name) Or perhaps same names have different values.

Either way, pretty cool. I agree, it would be nice to have a button or mode to stop spinning without having to hack it manually.

jl6•1h ago
Wait, does this not use the colornames.org dataset?
kouru225•53m ago
Very clearly shows much more sensitive our eyes are to luminance rather than hue or saturation, which was the main observation that allowed for the high compression rate of JPEG
jjcm•52m ago
One thing I'd love to see is a comparison between named colors and colors in use. What areas are under represented by named colors?

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