Question about how color palettes are generated.

[Chris Grant]

I have a question about how color palettes are generated. Specifically the source color palette option of "Generate Src Color Palette from... random source color." Can you help me to understand how this palette it being generated? What is the color theory that is being applied and how does it come up with so many colors. I am trying to match some of the programs capabilities in my own real life painting and I need a bit of direction to better generate my colors. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

[Synthetik]

All of the different color palette options that generate a set of source palette colors off of the current fixed source color do so by randomizing some set of color space attributes associated with the original fixed source color. In version 4 they are all marked appropriately. In 3.5 the random source color option corresponds to randomizing the luminance and saturation while keeping the hue constant.

There are lots of different color mixing conventions that painters and graphic designers use to work with color. This includes things like opponent or analogous mixing. An opponent color would be one that has a 180 degree hue offset (where hue can be thought of as a circle going from 0 to 360 degrees). An analogous color is an adjacent hue. Tri opponent mixing build 2 opponent colors at 120 degree hue offsets.

Mid luminance mixing build a color by mixing black, white, and a middle value luminance color in ratios that will match the original color value after spatially averaging over a local area. Spatial averaging can be a powerful technique. This means you lay down a collection of colors in a local area that will mix in the eye and visual system when viewed from afar to build a color that is essentially the average of the individual colors in the local area. This is how half-toning works for color or black and white printing. Pointillist paintings would be another example of this kind of thing.

Here's a link to another forum discussion where i posted a link to a cool web exhibit on color, vision, and art. They provide some nice examples of different historical art styles or movements that worked with different mechanistic interpretations of color theory in their art.

I'm always looking for more mechanistic algorithms for building interesting looking color palettes to build into studio artist, so feel free to bring up anything we might have missed adding that would be interesting to build in.

[Chris Grant]

So is this SRC Palette a combination of different algorithmic rules - monogamous, triadic, complementary... I guess I'm wondering specifically how so many colors are generated?

[Synthetik]

The source palette has a fixed set of 48 colors. So any algorithm that generates a new palette is going to generate 48 colors. 48 is an arbitrary number we choose. I'd like to make that adjustable in the future.

An algorithm that generates colors by randomizing some aspect of a particular color space like luminance or saturation can essentially generate an infinite set of different colors, limited only by the bit resolution of the color channels you are randomizing.

Depending on which palette generating option you choose some set of rules will be applies. So the hue might be kept constant while the luminance and saturation are randomized for each color in the generated palette.