How Do Color "tags" Work?

i think it takes an average of the colors and rounds them off. some times they are simply a mystery though.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Looks to me like it's showing the five most predominant colors. The orange in your painting is just accents and is probably taking up less area in the painting than all the cooler hues.

I think it is automatic, sort of like one of the features in the new creative cloud suite.

It picks the most predominant colours in your work

Thanks all for your replies.

I'm still not clear on how it "decides". (But note again, this is purely curiosity).

My painting with reds, blues, and neutral got 7 colors assigned. One of the assigned colors seems to the one on the donkey's nose, which doesn't make up much of the painting.

My painting with mostly blue, plus grey, green, and orange got assigned only 5 colors. The amount of orange is at least as much as the donkey nose color. With up to 7 colors assigned, orange could have been included.

I noticed on David's avatar piece that the gray of the headlights and bumper is assigned - yet it doesn't seem to be any more dominant than the orange in my painting.



Nancy's great pic has 11 assigned colors (!) and includes pink as an assigned color, but the total area of pink doesn't seem that much.



It seems overall to pick predominant colors as Abbie and David mentioned, but I think Mike is on to something, as he often is - sometimes they are simply a mystery. Or the formula it uses is too complex for my feeble brain - maybe some sort of weighted system. If there are lots of different colors, like Nancy's piece, then each one has only a small area, and they all "count". If there are only a few colors, like my turtles, then a color that might have a fair area of coverage doesn't count compared to the few that make up all the rest.

Or not.

I didn't really pay much attention to the color swatches until you mentioned. It does seem to pick colors that don't make much sense sometimes, however on my truck I think it did a good job. Gray is the 5th color and it's in a few parts of the truck, but the other four colors it chose are more dominant than the gray, in fact I think it even has the order correct for dominance. I was looking at another image earlier today and it actually picked 7 colors and some of them did seem odd to me. I'll be uploading a new truck painting tomorrow night, it will be interesting to see how accurate it gets that one.

I agree David - I think the colors picked by the system for your truck are spot on, including the gray. It's not dominant in the sense of total area, but it is important in the painting as an foil to the greens and golds.

On the other hand, orange plays the same role in my turtle painting, and orange doesn't show up.

Not sure what the formula is.

Will be interesting to see how your new uploads go.

cristolin.com

I uploaded a new orange truck painting last night and it seemed to pick the predominant colors pretty accurately. I don't know why it didn't pick up the orange in your turtles.

I thought the color tabs were for the decorator or interior designer to help them with their decision process.

Scott - that's my understanding as well. And for the casual buyer to use in a search if they are looking for something with specific colors to fit a particular location in their home. If someone wants something with gold, pale yellow, and blue, they can search on those colors.

I got curious about it because if the algorithm used by the system ignores an important color (blue perhaps) in a painting, it won't come up in the buyer's search.

Not sure how often people shop that way, and how many of the color tags are off, so it's probably not a big deal. I doubt if anyone who wants a painting of pond turtles would search based on orange anyway. But for some paintings and searches, it could make a difference.

I didn't even know you could filter a search by color swatches until I looked for it just now. Maybe designers would use something like that, my guess is though most people will just use keywords, so I always include a three or four of the most predominant colors in my keywords.