Beer geek here, that's search term issues. If you're wanting traditional "beer colors" but not colors from logos and parties, try "malted barley" for an average yellow-orange beer color gamut, and "chinook hops" (a specific variety) for the greens you might expect.
This is really nice -- much easier for a photographer like me to use that Kuler or the alternatives.
I have a question though: is it cool to use "All Rights Reserved" images on Flickr for something like this? Clicking through some of the photos shows that they're marked as "All Rights Reserved".
I'm asking because I made the decision to not use those on http://viewfinder.io/ based on the fact that I'm not a lawyer and prefer to err on the side of caution.
However, if it's not a legal problem to use copyrighted photos I could have much more data to play with, so I'm curious.
Great work. I did something like this and had it generate a sample website: a head, a content area, some tabbed navigation, a logo, and some headline colors.
I essentially quantized the image that was uploaded (I didnt use flickr) into 5 or 6 of the most obvious colours, then applied a little bit of math to determine which colours would work well together as well as adjusting the lightness (up/down) to help contrast.
It worked out okay. Maybe I should upload it? Your take on the flickr version is much, much cleaner than mine. Mine was a quick and dirty hack but was done as a learning experience.
Would what you're doing right now be possible using canvas on the client side?
On second thought, that might make things much more complicated / slow, you'd have to write something that allowed clients to send back processed results to speed things up for future searches by other users.
I wonder if there's any desire for something like http://maprejuice.com/, but easily applicable to any processing task that needs to happen in realtime * , as mentioned in the previous paragraph.
* But also support cached results.
PS If/when your no.de server crashes, do you have to push again to get it to restart? I was having this problem the other day — it's annoying to have to add a space to a file, commit and push just to restart the server.
1) http://i.imgur.com/uzsiH.png - overlapping text/controls on the homepage. Tried it in a few browsers. Width issue?
2) On the swatch pages, I'd make the controls just a little less translucent. Right now they're a little hard to see, though I grant that when you're used to the layout it becomes much less of an issue.
Other than those two minor points it's very nice website & I hope to use it in the future.
Very well executed. My only question is whether you have any definite ideas for monetizing it, or just a project for learning and fun. Either way, awesome job.
Small suggestion: when viewing one picture and its color scheme, put the “Hex RGB HSL HSV” text next to the radio buttons inside <label for="the_radio_button_id"> tags. This will provide a bigger hit-box for each choice by making the text and the radio buttons, not just the radio buttons, switch the color representation mode.
Genuine question (if anyone knows): This isnt a mockery or complaint, i'm only an amateur DSLR photographer, but how does one actually take advantage of these color palettes. I mean, what can they actually do for me?
I dont know if you use lightroom at all, but if say i want to create a preset filter, could this data be useful for that?
I often see photographs that have had color processing work done in Photoshop but can never quite seem to match them. I wonder if there is some way in which this would help(?)
Very nice site. I've used colr.org in the past, which does basically the same thing. I have to say, though, the UI on colorapi.com is much better. Good job! This site is bookmarked for use on my next web design project.
One feature request: the ability to upload images directly to colorapi.com.
Uploading images directly would allow designers to build a color palette to match a corporate logo, use the same color palettes as movies (by uploading images from http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ ), etc.
Interesting idea, but I'm guessing the UI is severely broken on Firefox/Windows: all I'm seeing after a search is a long band of colours scrolling across a tiny part of my screen, with no apparent way to see what RGB values they are, which photo(s) they came from, or any of the other interesting-sounding things mentioned by other posters here. What should it look like?
It would be really nice if I could middle-click "details" to open palettes in new tabs, or favorite palettes to come back to or even compare in a grid view later.
I'm also really confused about the swatch download. It tries to download as "default," and even if I change the file type to aco, I can't load it as a swatch in Photoshop.
A nice, gorgeous app. Definitely added to my collection.
Interesting to see these different color schemes.
There's one particular thing which I liked was that, it stores previous search results. I wasn't expecting it in first place, But liked to see previous search results.
One more thing, will there be any API access to this service.
This is honestly really cool. This reminds me of the Adobe Ideas iphone app that lets you import photos to get a color swatch (but still doesnt let you export them!!). I'm curious what you're using to host your app?
This is absolutely brilliant. The interface is very intuitive. Was node.js instrumental in making this work, or did you just want an excuse to learn it? (ie. rather than use a different server language)
Event driven development was instrumental. Back in 2007 I coded a similar project in PHP and had to take the app offline because it was painfully slow for end users.
I'm sure you can do something similar in any language by using something like RabbitMQ.
Sorry if someone already asked this, but could you release the source code for this project if it was just a learning experience for you? We could all learn from this and would appreciate it.
Personally, I'll use this for color schemes.
Check out http://colorapi.com/#!q/plumb%20tree , http://colorapi.com/#!q/iceland , http://colorapi.com/#!q/alps , http://colorapi.com/#!q/rainforest .