Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mpetroff 2113 days ago
> The key would be to spend an absurd amount of time carefully cataloguing good colors – by hand – and training it to extrapolate from that information.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Not only do you need to catalog good colors (and color combinations), you need to have it done by a large number of people, since different people perceive color differently and have different aesthetic preferences. This is something I've been working on in the limited context of color cycles for data visualization and plotting [1][2]. Based on my preliminary analysis, these data are quite noisy.

[1] https://colorcyclesurvey.mpetroff.net/ [2] https://mpetroff.net/2020/01/color-cycle-survey-update/

1 comments

Not to mention are viewing the colors on different screens, with possibly different tv/monitor modes enabled which will alter colors. I have two monitors where colors can look noticeably different. Unfortunately it's probably not feasible to account for this.
You're absolutely right, and that's an exciting area: viewing conditions matter!

Well, different monitors aren't really different viewing conditions, but it's a similar idea.

When people can't see colors too well, they turn up the brightness. But that changes the problem entirely.

Even something like whether a window has curtains or not will completely change whether you can perceive a certain "vibrance." Lots of the conversation in parallel replies has probably suffered due to such confusions.