Show HN: Explore color palettes inspired by 3000 master painter artworks

oouli about 5 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on paletteinspiration.com

RU version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

I built PaletteInspiration.com, a browsable archive of color palettes pulled from artworks by 3,000+ master painters (Monet, Vermeer, Raphael, Van Gogh). Why I built it: every color palette generator I tried converged on the same five muted pastels. Painters spent centuries figuring out color and we mostly ignore that body of work when picking colors for digital design. Please share your feedback on the Color Harmony Explorer - drag the wheel to any color and it shows which hues master painters historically paired with it (not only standard complementary, analogous, triadic, etc.) It is solely based on co-occurrence across thousands of real paintings. Not algorithmic color theory rules - actual empirical pairings.

No signup, no paywall, no email capture. Just curious what people think.

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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

S0und•about 3 hours ago

As an "expert viewer" of Baumgartner Restoration, this site usefulness is questionable. If you look at those color palettes, most of them brownish that is because of dirty & old oxidised varnish. These are not the intended look of these paintings. So these color palettes has nothing to do with those 3000 masters.

https://youtube.com/@baumgartnerrestoration

molf•about 3 hours ago

Agreed. I absolutely adore the idea of it! But all the brownish colours tell the same story.

For some additional context; many old pigments were not stable at all.

https://www.vangoghstudio.com/what-were-the-original-colors-...

9dev•about 1 hour ago

It’s the colours you will see today when looking at the paintings, however. Your point is valid, but even the somewhat "chromatically degraded" versions of many of these are gorgeous.

ouli•about 3 hours ago

This is a very interesting perspective. I'd thought the muted, brownish colors in these paintings had to do with the quality and availability of pigments during that period.

mbivert•about 2 hours ago

There's most likely multiple aspects at play: high-chroma pigments were historically limited and/or expensive; varnish yellowed over time; pigments faded. The digitization process probably wasn't perfect as well (I'd expect modern scans should be fairly good though).

nekooooo•about 3 hours ago

hundreds of years of oxidation will make everything brown.

pzoln•about 1 hour ago

so is there a formula that can be automatically applied to restore the original colors? at least some reasonable approximation, based on the painting's age?

hparadiz•about 2 hours ago

I used to run an art social network 15 years ago that did this automatically with every piece of art uploaded and then it let you search for art by color that way.

Basically

$average = new Imagick( $file );

$average->quantizeImage( $numColors, Imagick::COLORSPACE_RGB, 0, false, false ); //Reduce the amount of colors to 10

$average->uniqueImageColors(); //Only save one pixel of each color

frangonf•23 minutes ago

As a gruvbox enjoyer, I approve.

BlueRock-Jake•about 1 hour ago

This is great! Love the idea. You should send to some art programs, sure they would get a kick out of it. Also gives another use case outside of just digital design.

vardump•about 1 hour ago

Weird how similar many of those are to Commodore 64 palette.

thangalin•about 3 hours ago

Hey ouli, your hello email bounces.

ouli•about 3 hours ago

Sorry for the inconvenience. The email works now. Regarding the article - I use similar ideas to extract colors form artwork images, only difference is I added color prevalence scale for each color and limited it to 10 colors per palette.

code51•about 3 hours ago

Why do I only see Claude in this UI? It seems Claude is picking up the very same color scheme for many webpage building requests.

mannyv•12 minutes ago

app version?

afolkest•about 4 hours ago

Love it. I'll be using this on a weekly basis in my art practice.

Let me know if you ever create an API endpoint.

ouli•about 4 hours ago

Thank you for kind words! That was my exact intention to share empirically proven color palettes for artists and designers like you. Adding API endpoint is a great idea. I'll let you know when it will be ready.

xydac•about 4 hours ago

this is interesting, we should wire this to frontend design system library that automatically helps user use these palette.

nmstoker•about 2 hours ago

Yes, exactly this. It falls far short of the potential if it just shows the colours alone and not how they might appear if applied to sites, charts, illustrations or whatever you might want them for.

ouli•9 minutes ago

I am planning to add a section where people can re-color their portraits, landscape images or even interior rooms using carefully curated palettes based on master painters palettes. Applying to websites, illustrations or charts also can be extremely useful.

ouli•about 4 hours ago

Thank you. Glad you find it interesting.

oybng•about 3 hours ago

Very nice. My only gripe is the automatic page switching on scroll, never encountered that before and I absolutely hate it

ouli•about 3 hours ago

Thank you for the kind words and insightful feedback. My intention with page-switching on scroll was to offer more color palettes without requiring extra clicks. I had some reservations about it too, but couldn't find a better way to provide a continuous feed of similar palettes. I'll work on improving that feature.

CSSer•about 2 hours ago

The problem, from a UX standpoint, is that you need a visual affordance for the behavior. That is, you must indicate that it's about to happen and give the user the opportunity to abort. Alternatively, a continuous gallery could suffice.

ouli•15 minutes ago

Adding visual clues for automatic scrolling is something I really need to rethink in order to make this feature work as intended. Thank you for the hint!

oybng•about 3 hours ago

It's very convenient, I wish I could offer a worthy suggestion. The trouble in my case is that it's very sensitive and the palettes are barely in view before the page refreshes, they don't reach the center of the screen. Thanks for sharing

Theodores•about 2 hours ago

I am currently looking for colour palettes and this website is of interest to me.

Small snag, some UTF8 things are going on with some colour names, I am sure you know and have cursed accordingly.

I like OKLCH colours and the ability to mix them in interesting ways using CSS things. This means I don't do hex codes for colours in CSS. I can translate though, however, soon some people will demand OKLCH, so you might as well add it in, trying to get it natural with the picker.

I appreciate the masters but I wonder how this would work using other sources, for example, Sunday newspaper supplements from the last century, and their glossy adverts, which were to a higher standard than what we get today.

ouli•19 minutes ago

Adding OKLCH color codes will be a great addition. Thank you for your suggestion!

There are 2 art style pages namely Advertising and Posters styles: https://paletteinspiration.com/advertisement-palettes/ https://paletteinspiration.com/poster-palettes/

I am aware that Advertisement palettes mostly based on Alphonse Mucha work since I could not include more recent ad illustrations for copywrite reasons.