If you’re looking for a new way to find color inspiration in your photos, try this simple Photoshop technique to pull out colors from a single pixel line and create some unique color artworks… there are so many vastly different results from the same images depending on where you select the single pixel line. Try it out:

Photoshop Instructions

-Open Any Photo You Want
-Use the Single Row Marquee Tool & Select a Single Pixel Row
-Transform (CTRL+T) & Stretch to Full Height
-Then Use Filter > Artistic > Dry Brush

A Gallery of Single Pixel Color Explorations

Birds in Wheat by Mike Ruggirello




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Most everyone who’s worked in any media for screen would (and should) be aware of the importance of the RGB value system. While it is a concise system for describing colors, it is somewhat difficult for us to describe the nature of a color by amounts of each channel by eye. So rather than describing the additive blend of colors, we can describe a color with HSV which breaks color down into more simplistic characteristics. Let’s look at each of these in detail:

RGB

Defined by listing how much red, green, and blue is contained in a single value. Being additive, the more of each color that is added, the brighter (and closer to white) it becomes.

While it’s helpful to denote how much of each color exists, it is not a very friendly system to describe a hue shift, saturation, or value/brightness. Try looking at a color and try to arbitrarily dictate how much of each primary color composes it. Not so easy, right?


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In the U.S. 7% of the male population – or about 10.5 million men – and 0.4% of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently. Color blindness affects a significant amount of the population, and it is even more prevalent in more isolated populations with a smaller gene pools. It is mostly a genetic condition, though it can be caused by eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals.

For those of us who see colors just fine, it is hard to imagine what those with color blindness are seeing. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter.

Popular Websites: As Seen by the Color Blind

The Color Blind Web Page Filter, which was used in this post to demonstrate the different types of colorblindness, allows you to view what a site looks like to people with each type of color blindness. Here are a few examples from some popular websites.

Iconic Art: As Seen by the Color Blind

Some would say we all see art in our own unique way… that would be especially true for the color blind. Here are a couple examples of some of the most iconic paintings as seen by the color blind.

Color Blindness Background

Using the filter we’ll take a look at the current most popular palette, July, and how it is seen by those with different types of color blindness.

The normal human retina contains two kinds of light cells: the rod cells (active in low light) and the cone cells (active in normal daylight). Normally, there are three kinds of cones, each containing a different pigment. The cones are activated when the pigments absorb light. The absorption spectra of the cones differ; one is maximally sensitive to short wavelengths, one to medium wavelengths, and the third to long wavelengths (their peak sensitivities are in the blue, yellowish-green, and yellow regions of the spectrum, respectively). The absorption spectra of all three systems cover much of the visible spectrum, so it is not entirely accurate to refer to them as “blue”, “green” and “red” receptors, especially because the “red” receptor actually has its peak sensitivity in the yellow. The sensitivity of normal color vision actually depends on the overlap between the absorption spectra of the three systems: different colors are recognized when the different types of cone are stimulated to different extents. Red light, for example, stimulates the long wavelength cones much more than either of the others, and reducing wavelength causes the other two cone systems to be increasingly stimulated, causing a gradual change in hue. Many of the genes involved in color vision are on the X chromosome, making color blindness more common in males than in females.

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I came across this wonderfully interesting Flickr set the other day. A selection of 49 hand-colored photos of Meiji-era MAIKO and GEISHA in swimsuit fashions of the time. The photos are from a collection of 150 from the Flickr user Okinawa Soba. Obviously, it was the colors that first grabbed my attention, but the discovery led me to look a little more into the history of hand-colored photos.

The popularity of hand-colored photos peaked in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s but fell from their standing due to the development of color film. They were especially popular in Japan.

Hand-Coloring

Hand-colouring refers to any of a number of methods of manually adding colour to a black-and-white photograph or other image to heighten its realism. Typically, water-colours, oils and other paints or dyes are applied to the image surface using brushes, fingers, cotton swabs or airbrushes. Some photographic genres, particularly landscapes and portraits, have been more often hand-coloured than others, and hand-coloured photographs have been popular enough that some firms specialised in producing them.

Photo from Okinawa Soba

Until the middle of the 20th century, nearly all photography was monochrome – essentially black-and-white, as exemplified by the gelatin silver print. Some photographic processes inherently produced images with an overall colour as, for example, the blue of cyanotypes, and photographic processes were altered by various techniques to produce variations in tone

Swiss painter and printmaker Johann Baptist Isenring used a mixture of gum arabic and pigments to make the first coloured daguerreotype in 1840 or 1841. The coloured powder was fixed on the delicate surface of the daguerreotype by the application of heat. Variations of this technique were patented in England by Richard Beard in 1842 and in France by Étienne Lecchi in 1842 and Léotard de Leuze in 1845. Later, hand-colouring was used with successive photographic innovations, from albumen and gelatin silver prints to lantern slides and transparency photography.

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One of the more colorful things that sometimes gets overlooked by many of us city folk, who only see nature and bodies of water when there is a popular video on YouTube of someone crashing their personal watercraft, are the carefully crafted colors of fishing lures. Special care is taken in the color selection by lure makers, as it is a very important part in catching the right fish in the right conditions.

Most fish, except for some of those in the deepest of darkest of oceans, where there is no light at all, can see colors, some even have four to five different cones making their ability to see color even greater than our own. While there is some, but not much, evidence that fish have a particular tendency towards red, there is more to selecting the right color of lure than just picking the one with the palette you like best. So, if you ever get a chance leave you computer behind and head out to the lake, we’ve put together a guide to help you make the right color choice when selecting a lure.

In order to select the best lure color palette there are a few things that need to be considered, such as: Water depth and clarity, season, and the time of day.

Here is a wonderful article, with great graphics that I really wanted to steal for this post, that you should check out for more information: Exploding The Myths With Some Truths About Lure Color, by Greg Vinall.

Water Depth

The consensus is that on sunny days brighter colors are the best option, and on cloudy days, darker more natural colors should be used. This is because the various light wavelengths are absorbed at different rates in water, longer wavelengths, like reds, are absorbed easily where as shorter ones, like violet, are absorbed much more slowly and can penetrate into deeper water. So, the farther down your lure goes the fewer and fewer colors will be seen by the fish.


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As any cool kid will tell you, the most important palette you can wear is on your sneakers. Luckily, most of the shoe industry is right on track with the newly developing long-tail, Limited Edition, Artist Series, Custom Designed and DIY markets, which includes any color lover who has the perfect palette to show off on the streets.

Custom Sneakers

Most of the major brands have jumped on the DIY sneaker design track, but not all the sites are the same. While I didn’t go through every shoe site, here are a few that even if you are not about to buy a new pair of shoes, will at least keep you busy and distracted as you go through all the colorway options available.

Converse

Link

• Shoes: 12 styles
• Materials: Canvas, Suede, Leather
• Colors: 30 colors and patterns
• Delivery Time: 2 to 4 weeks

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Many of you here in the community are quite familiar with the color tools available on COLOURlovers (if you’re new to the site a good place to start is the FAQ), but what about other helpful color tools that might exist somewhere on the internet. Well, here are two such tools: ‘Name That Color‘ and ‘Color Name & Hue‘, that I came across recently; one for color vocabulary and identification, the other, a helpful tool for those who are colorblind.

‘Name That Color’

‘Name That Color‘ is a helpful little site created by a dude with other dudes in mind, but it most certainly will also help those of the female variety.

For those of us who can’t exactly remember, or who never knew, what color Danube is, and others who just want to expand their color vocabulary, so instead of red you can use Monza, even though it is totally just Red, might want to check it out.

Simply create a color manually or enter the Hex code to reveal what you mistakenly took for Mojo, when it was, in fact, Mule Fawn.

The database was created from names found on Wikipedia, Crayola, and the Resene Color-Name Dictionary. It’s probably good that he didn’t try to use the COLOURlovers library of color names. Besides what an interminable task it would be, he would probably have more than a few colors with the same name, but that are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum, or, all the colors would be named ‘love.’ And while I personally prefer to make up color names on-the-fly, like the Suddlepup shirt I’m currently wearing, it might be nice to be able to narrow it down to around Burnt Sienna if, god forbid, you had to discus color with your designer or decorator over the phone.


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We thought it was time to check in on our most loved Palettes, Colors and Patterns making their way around the community at the moment.

With 108,705 members who have created 1,196,974 Colors, 431,454 Palettes and 133,971 Patterns, we needed a way to divide up all the colors into a manageable post, as to avoid creating an overwhelming color explosion that might lead to the mind collapse of some poor blog reader. So, we are doing it by color, of course. Here are 50 of the top Palettes, Colors and Patterns from the community, starting with RED.

Red Palettes

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Inspiration from the colors of the great impressionists, plus some information about each painting and artist from wikipedia.

For more information about each artist or to see more of their work, just click on any image.

Armand Guillaumin: La Place Valhubert.
		Born in Paris, France, he worked at his uncle’s lingerie shop while attending evening drawing lessons. He also worked for a French government railway before studying at the Académie Suisse in 1861. There, he met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro with whom maintained lifelong friendships. While he never achieved the stature of these two, his influence on their work was significant. Cézanne attempted his first etching based on Guillaumin paintings of barges on the River Seine.

Armand Guillaumin: Sunset at Ivry
		Noted for his intense colors, major museums around the world display Guillaumin’s art. He is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, the Creuse département, and the area around Les Adrets-de-l’Estérel near the Mediterraneran coast in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France. Armand Guillaumin died in 1927 in Orly, Val-de-Marne just south of Paris.

Claude Monet: Grainstack, Sunset
		The primary subjects of all of the paintings in the series are stacks of hay that have been stacked in the field after the harvest season. The title refers primarily to a twenty-five canvas series begun the autumn of 1890 and continued through the following spring, using that year’s harvest. Some use a broader definition of the title to refer to other paintings by Monet with this same theme. The series is known for its thematic use of repetition to show differences in perception of light across various times of day, seasons, and types of weather. The subjects were painted in fields near Monet’s home in Giverny, France.

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The umbrella or parasol, brolly, gamp, parapluie and bumbershoot, as it is also known in other names, is one of man’s oldest artifacts. Its long history spans great empires and interminable distances, and has been on record since there were records for things to be on. The history dates back just far enough that there is no conclusive evidence or agreement among brolliologists, those who study umbrellas, of the its true origin. Nor is it agreed upon whether it was first used as protection from the sun or from the rain.

Below is a wonderfully interesting article about umbrellas that I found over at the Big Site of Amazing Facts, mixed in with a little color inspiration.

Photo by dearoot

The umbrella is so old that brolliologists can’t agree on its origin, or decide whether it was first used for protection from the rain or the sun. They do know that it was employed as an item of religious and ceremonial regalia from the earliest days of ancient Egypt. Egyptian mythology held that the visible sky was actually the underbelly of a god stretched from one end of the earth to the other like an immense umbrella. Hence, in contemporary art, priests and Pharoahs were often placed in the shade of an umbrella to symbolize royal and religious power.

Assyrian tablets dating from 1350 B.C. depict a king leading his retinue while servants shade the royal head with a long-handled parasol. In India, a religious group known as the Jains called their ultimate heaven of perfected souls by a name that translates as “The Slightly Tilted Umbrella.”

Photo by Elizabeth Thomsen

The early Greeks used the umbrella as a symbol of productivity and sexual aggression, usually associated with the god Bacchus, and they carried umbrellas in many of their parades and festivals. In later centuries, the Greeks put the umbrella to a more utilitarian use as a sunshade, and developed sunshade hats similar to the sombrero.

The Romans, too, used parasols against the sun. Women attending chariot races in the amphitheatre sometimes dyed their parasols to denote their favorite chariot team. If you’ve ever attended a football game in drizzly weather and have been annoyed to no end by umbrellas blocking your line of vision, you may find it comforting to know that the Romans had a similar problem at their games, with a hot dispute over parasol use finally decided by the emperor Domitian, in favor of the sunshade.

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