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The color of every photo on the internet blended together is orange
- qiqing 12y agoIt's the color of incandescent bulbs, fire, and other popular sources of light, reflected off of a large variety of surfaces.
- Rangi42 12y agoThat's what I thought of too. It could be tested by averaging a pool of images lit by fluorescent bulbs, LEDs, or LCD monitor glow.
- anon4 12y agoAlso the colour of a human, the most photographed animal on the planet.
- Stwerp 12y agoThe article addresses that and intentionally chooses non-human subjects such as walls of graffiti. These still show his `emergent orange' effect. At first I assumed it was his averaging technique, but I'm more apt to believe it has to do with the spectrum of light which is being `sampled' by the selection of photos.
- derrasterpunkt 12y agoSo the color could change in the next years with the emergence of fluorescent lamps, LEDs and cold cathode lighting.
- baddox 12y agoDon't most of those newer lighting technologies usually try to imitate the color temperature of traditional lighting?
- sp332 12y agoCompact fluorescent bulbs (cheap ones anyway) are quite "warm" and LEDs are cool, almost blue. I ended up combining them in my kitchen to get a color I liked.
- egypturnash 12y agoThis is pretty much what I was coming here to say. Don't forget that we live under a yellow sun, too. There is a hell of a lot of warm light in our world, natural and artificial.
- MrRage 12y agoSun is actually white... which is why you see a all the colors in a rainbow. I know Superman lied to you. :)
- trhway 12y agoSun's radiation peak energy at sea level is around 500-600nm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#mediaviewer/File:Solar_Spectrum.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#mediaviewer/File:Solar... which is green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#mediaviewer/File:Linear_visible_spectrum.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#mediaviewer/File:Linear_v... That is why grass/trees are green - they consume only the edges of the spectrum (about 10-15% of the total sunlight coming through) bouncing the rest back. With respect to the original point about orange being average color of Internet photos - keep in mind that most photos are produced by digital CCD cameras which are more sensitive to orange/red than green/blue. http://www.gitthailand.com/image/ccd-spectrum.jpg http://www.gitthailand.com/image/ccd-spectrum.jpg
- MrRage 12y agoInteresting. I guess it actually emits all sorts of frequencies of light visible or not, but Superman is still wrong. :)
- tgb 12y agoWhy does that explain why plants are generally green? If you had told me that the energy peak was at X wavelength, I would have guessed that plants absorbed most of that wavelength in order to not be wasteful rather than preferentially reflecting that wavelength.
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- hazz 12y agoThis wouldn't explain why the same effect was seen from photos of graffiti (which presumably were outside, in the day.) "When someone told him that it was probably due to the colors of flesh in photographs, he tried it with a pool of graffiti. Still orange. "
- wlesieutre 12y agoI'm curious how much exposed wall was included in those pictures. Graffiti is vastly more common on brick and concrete surfaces, which 99% of the tie are red, yellow, cream, or gray. Regardless of what color the graffiti is, if there's a lot of backdrop behind it I'm not at all surprised that it'd average to orange. Pick something else like "pictures of forests" instead of "pictures of graffiti" and suddenly your average stops being orange because you're not taking photos of buildings anymore.
- krazydad 12y agoIt is perhaps worth pointing out that I observed the same effect in collections of purely synthetic art (such as Fractals). https://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/3794489938/in/set-72157621965748238 https://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/3794489938/in/set-721... While I don't think this rules out light as a possible culprit, it perhaps implies that humans are mimicking the natural world when they are making color choices.
- diminish 12y agoi m using a ruby gem, color, to mix, blend colors. There are so many parameters and methods you may use to blend 2 colors. So i think, you may attain not only orange but other colors too deoending on how you blend
- Someone 12y agolooking at lists of RGB color names (e.g. http://cloford.com/resources/colours/500col.htm http://cloford.com/resources/colours/500col.htm, http://www.keller.com/html-quickref/4a.html http://www.keller.com/html-quickref/4a.html, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names) I notice that everything called 'orange' has a blue component of zero. So, this claim would imply that the average color in nature doesn't have a blue component. I guess the conclusion must be a) the sky is blue, and b) the majority of photos on the internet does not show sky.
- 0x0 12y agoAlso, the common rgb->greyscale algorithm has a very low factor for the blue component (0.21 for r, 0.72 for g, 0.07 for b was one of the first on google)
- yvsong 12y agoI wonder what the average color of all web pages is, and that of all smart phone app icons. Edit: web pages should be weighted by page views, and app icons by downloads.
- pariya 12y agoMy guess is that the average smart phone app colour is blue.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoIf you're weighting by page views, you could get a pretty good approximation by just taking screenshots of the top 10000 or so websites.
- beejiu 12y agoI'm a little dubious about interpolating RGB values in that way -- I don't think averaging the numbers directly maps to the real world colour mixing you'd observe. I'd be interested in what the result is in Lab colour space.
- klodolph 12y agoAh, that's problematic. The RGB color model is closely modeled after the physical phenomenon of light. In a linear RGB color space, you can average two colors to get the same result as if you had physically averaged those colors in the real world by combining light. However, Lab is modeled after the subjective human perception of light and color. Lab is divorced from physical interpretations. Averaging colors in Lab does not have any real physical interpretation.
- shkkmo 12y ago"The RGB color model is closely modeled after the physical phenomenon of light." Not actually true. RGB is modeled after the mechanism by which humans perceive colors (using red, blue, and green photoreceptors). If you mix Red and Blue light, you still only have Red and Blue light, but the human perception system will perceive purple light, even though there is no EM radiation at the 'purple' frequency.
- Sharlin 12y agoThere's no receptor that actually peaks at red, though - it's more like we have indigo, yellowish-green, and greenish-yellow receptors, usually called S, M and L respectively. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1416_Color_Sensitivity.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1416_Color_Sensitivit... (note the sensitivities are normalized - in actuality the blue receptors are much less sensitive than the other two)
- klodolph 12y ago> Not actually true. RGB is modeled after the mechanism by which humans perceive colors (using red, blue, and green photoreceptors). This is exactly the misconception I was talking about when I said that RGB is modeled after physical processes and not after human perception. There is no such thing as a red, green, or blue photoreceptor. There are three types of cones: L, M, and S; there is also scotopic vision with its own response curve. The L, M, and S cones respond to a gamut which cannot be reproduced with any RGB system that uses real primaries. Or, put another way, no RGB system with real primaries can specify all the colors we see. Instead, RGB is a simulation of a physical system which uses three light sources: red, green, and blue. That's all it is. For example, imagine that you have three LEDs, or three phosphors, or three lasers. It doesn't matter. The point is that RGB simulates these kinds of physical systems, not the systems in the human eye. On the other hand, Lab and XYZ systems are modeled after the perception of light. The experiments which lead to the creation of the XYZ color system had subject participants match the color output of an RGB system with that of a monochromatic light source. This experiment allowed us to use a well understood color space (RGB) based on a physical process to test how human vision worked.
- peter303 12y agoThe color of the Universe is white-green according to this analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte
- sp332 12y agothey soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper,[1] in which they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beigeish white.
- svantana 12y agoI don't understand why it's presented as such a mystery? The average color obviously exists, and if I had guessed it would be a reddish/yellowish gray (due to the ubiquity of incandescent lighting, the non-UV-reflecting properties of surfaces etc). I was hoping to also see a covariance matrix, or maybe even a 3d histogram of pixel colors on the web -- that would be interesting. This person is clearly not a data scientist :)
- willvarfar 12y agoHmm, are you really sure that, had you been asked without reading the article, you'd think the average colour to be reddish/yellowish gray due to lighting and ... etc? Really really? If I'd been asked, I'd perhaps have tried to be clever and said that the top half of the image would be blue as the sky is blue and indoor walls are usually white which won't hurt the blue so much, and that the bottom half would be a browny green due to grass and carpet etc.
- GhotiFish 12y agoThis is not to toot my own horn here (I would of expected graduations as well due to the sky and the ground), but I think I would of said It would of tended to orange, on the grounds that (and this is just my suspicion) people find a more orange hue a more pleasing whitebalance. What is online is what has been shared, and what is been shared will invariably be pleasing to the people that shared it. Obviously, this is just another explanation. Actually I would of liked to of seen some of those aggregate photos. Maybe there WERE graduations! edit: wish granted!: http://jbum.com/papers/EmergentOrange_paper.pdf http://jbum.com/papers/EmergentOrange_paper.pdf some of his sample sets did produce graduations, in particular vignettes and lighter at the top darker at the bottom themes. in defence of my statement is figure 10 Figure 10. Averages of four different pools of digital abstract art found on Flickr. Pools used: Processing, CGArt, Computer Art Creations, Generative and Evolutioanry Art for some reason he produces a surprisingly orange result, and still believes that the overall orange hue may be due to: 4) It’s caused by chemistry & physics. The amalgam photos are functioning as a kind of mass spectrometer, reflecting the average chemical composition of the subjects being photographed. [...] I find #4 the most convincing. It is not necessarily mutually exclusive with some of the others (e.g. the chemistry of the earth/sun affects human choices and camera design). Meh.
- benhardy 12y agoWell thanks a LOT, John Boehner.
- nostromo 12y agohttp://www.chm.davidson.edu/vce/coordchem/spectrum.jpg http://www.chm.davidson.edu/vce/coordchem/spectrum.jpg Orange is near the middle of the visible spectrum.
- Strilanc 12y agoThe averaging is happening in RGB space, not an HSV-esque space. There's no obvious reason to expect the hue to end up averaged. For example, the RGB average of red and blue is not orange; it's pink or purple.
- sp332 12y agoBut the world isn't in RGB space. If you take a bunch of samples in the whole color spectrum, then approximate them each into sRGB, the average probably won't move that much.
- Strilanc 12y agoActually, it could move a lot. For example, consider what happens when averaging (0,1) and (0,-1) in cartesian coordinates vs polar coordinates. In cartesian coordinates you get the midpoint at (0,0), but in polar coordinates both have the same length... so you just get a point a (1+1)/2 distance along (0°+180°)/2. That's either (1,0) or (-1,0) depending on the handedness of the coordinate system, off to the side instead of in between! The same effect happens in RGB vs HSV.
- Tloewald 12y agoActually the article is confused on this very point. I think it's actually implied that it's sampled in HSV and not weighted for saturation or value. Edit: his blog entry implies RGB, and it looks like the average color is actually brownish grey, which would be highly unsurprising to anyone who has mixed paint.
- sp332 12y agoI just tried my own suggestion. For a random sampling of wavelengths from 390 to 700, I converted each to RGB using this function http://stackoverflow.com/a/3407960 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3407960 Then I averaged the R, G, and B values. The result is 144, 122, 90 or #907A5A which is... a dim brown color, with a "hue" of 36 which is very orange. Edit: undid sRGB conversion since I think i did it wrong.
- spion 12y agoHere is a possible explanation: most digital camera makers tweak the color balance towards warm rather than cool or neutral because consumers prefer that.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- willvarfar 12y agoStrange, I can't repeat the results on various folders I have. I wrote a quick little (slow) Python script to compute a blended photo: https://gist.github.com/williame/92c7179d0963553d605f https://gist.github.com/williame/92c7179d0963553d605f If a folder has some theme, such as a folder I have of a boat regatta, I get an average picture that looks as you'd expect. So the code seems to average correctly. If I run it on a bigger assemblage of photos, I tend to get a uniform gray though. What am I doing wrong? (I encourage you to try yourself!)
- sp332 12y agoMaybe you should include lots of faces? And check that you're doing sRGB gamma math correctly. http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch24.html http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch24.html Edit: I'm guessing convert("RGB") means convert from whatever to linear RGB? So that part should be fine.
- willvarfar 12y agoAnd yet the article says its not to do with the colour of flesh etc..
- sp332 12y agoWhen someone told him that it was probably due to the colors of flesh in photographs, he tried it with a pool of graffiti. Still orange. Looks like there was only one test done explicitly without people.
- krazydad 12y agoHi, this Jim, the subject of the article. The Atlantic article omits that I'm normalizing the result (otherwise, the histogram is clustered in the middle and you get a dirt-brown color -- the hue is orange, but it's very desaturated). Here is pseudo-code in Processing showing what I'm doing: To avoid floating point rounding issues, I process the pixels in integer space. For each channel (R,G,B) I create an 1D array of integers (one integer for each pixel) and initialize them to zero. smaxPixels = width*height; srmap = new int[smaxPixels]; sgmap = new int[smaxPixels]; sbmap = new int[smaxPixels]; for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) { srmap[i] = 0; sgmap[i] = 0; sbmap[i] = 0; } For each pixel in each image, I add the pixel value to the sum for the corresponding pixel (in the below code, 'offset' is typically zero). for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) { int px = sImage.pixels[i]; srmap[i] += red(px); sgmap[i] += green(px); sbmap[i] += blue(px); } I then produce a normalized image by finding the minimum and maximum components, and mapping all the pixel sums to that range. for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) { minValue = min(minValue, srmap[i]); maxValue = max(maxValue, srmap[i]); minValue = min(minValue, sgmap[i]); maxValue = max(maxValue, sgmap[i]); minValue = min(minValue, sbmap[i]); maxValue = max(maxValue, sbmap[i]); } pg.beginDraw(); // pg is an offscreen Image buffer I am going to draw into... pg.loadPixels(); for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) { if (maxImagesPerTile == 1) pg.pixels[i] = color(srmap[i],sgmap[i],sbmap[i]); else pg.pixels[i] = color( map(srmap[i],minValue,maxValue,0,255), map(sgmap[i],minValue,maxValue,0,255), map(sbmap[i],minValue,maxValue,0,255)); } pg.updatePixels(); pg.endDraw(); That's the essence of it. The bright "orange" is a normalization effect. Note that if I were to simply "average" the images without the normalization step, the resulting color is generally a dirt-brown. Normalizing the image has the effect of increasing the saturation and the contrast, without affecting the hue in an HSL sense. I discuss this in my paper, although the Atlantic article omitted this important point.
- roberjo 12y agoWhen you blend in 100M 'spacer.gif' images, it can skew the result.
- freshbreath 12y agoI tried making a site to auto-blend images from Google Images… https://github.com/derv82/ImageBlender https://github.com/derv82/ImageBlender http://blen.derv.us http://blen.derv.us Last time I checked, it didn't work 100%, and was laggy. But I learned bootstrap in the process, and some of the quirks associated with HTML5 canvas.
- rukittenme 12y agoWe need to throw out the spray tan selfie outliers.