So Paul mentioned to me today (via email) that he really liked the Studio Artist V5 factory presets, specifically the colorization of the output they generated. I believe that the extra visual punch associated with that is tied to the color palettes that were embedded into many of those presets. They were all designed by a particular visual artist with a very good color sense.
Many people might not be aware that you can embed custom color palettes into just about everything inside of Studio Artist. Paint Synthesizer, Vectorizer, IpOps, Texture Synthesizer, MSG, PASeq.
We try to set up the presets so that you can turn on or off saving the current source color palette embedded into the preset. Because both situations are useful.
If you turn on embedding, then the preset will overwrite the existing source color palette when it is imported. This lets you associate a specific aesthetic colorization into the preset.
If you turn off embedding, then you can design a preset that does generic colorization with whatever is inside of the source color palette. And when you open that non-embedded preset, it will not blow away whatever is in the source palette (which embedded presets will do).
Gallery Show has generative options for both the source color palette, source color gradient, and the source color memories. You can see them in the V5.5 screen shot below.
None leaves the current source colorization alone.
Gen from Source auto-generates a source color palette and color gradient from the source image.
Random Gen is a random procedural generative strategy for the source color palette and color gradient.
Gen from Source + Mem auto-generates a source color palette and color gradient and the color memories from the source image.
Random Gen + Mem is a random procedural generative strategy for the source color palette and color gradient and color memories.
Gen from Style auto-generates the source color palette and color gradient from the current loaded style image.
I think it would be a good idea to allow for a random selection from a color palette folder, so we're going to add that fairly quickly after the V5.5 release.
I'd also love to hear any feedback from people on approaches you think are good for auto-generating random color palettes.
How do you go about choosing the individual colors in a color palette for your work?
And how many colors do you think is a good option for the number of colors in a color palette?
Our current approaches randomly select from a set of heuristic colorization strategies, and then derive a variant color palette off of that. By variant i mean that there is additional randomization within the specific randomly selected generative strategy being used.
Our current generate strategies for creating color palettes have a definite look to them. Which is usually pretty different from the really aesthetically stylized color palettes associated with the V5 factory presets.
This is the kind of feature where adding a few additional options can radically change and improve the appearance of the derived effects. That's why i'm so interesting in figuring out ways to make it aesthetically smarter.
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Thank you John, I have used color palettes some but not often, I will try out more using what you wrote and let you know what I think. In the past I have actually used Studio Artist to generate color palettes from images that I made to use in other programs by saving them as images and sampling from them in those other programs. Honestly I don't think about color much but I will try to do so more
MSG has a somewhat analogous approach to working with color palettes and color gradients as gallery show.
So in the simple MSG example below, the first color gradient stream embedded in the MSG preset is colorizing a monochrome procedural turbulence image.
Studio Artist does incorporate a bunch of 'color theory' heuristics into it. For example, under the edit menu you can access different 'color theory' randomization options to generate new color palettes off of the source color.
These are the same kinds of things being used by both gallery show and MSG mutation in their internal generative color palette (and color gradient) generator.
As an aside, it's interesting to see the colorization of the semi-transparent mac menu by the canvas image in the screen shot above.
All of these have a certain stylized visual aesthetic. But i'd really like to add some more options that are smarter. More nuanced might be a better term, since most of these are probably overtly stylized in an extreme sense. The 2 Analogous ones being the exception in my mind.
We also let people randomly generate all of the colors in the palette (CoinToss option in the Generate From menu above). Again, this produces a very stylized look that i would characterize as 'tie-dye teeshirt' or 'psychedelic' in appearance. It can be visually interesting, but it's very artificial in its appearance.