Show HN: My Node.js two weekend project. Color palettes from Flickr images. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My Node.js two weekend project. Color palettes from Flickr images.

colorapi.com

159 pointsbfm63 comments

This is "minimum viable" done perfectly. Well done.

Personally, I'll use this for color schemes.

Check out http://colorapi.com/#!q/plumb%20tree , http://colorapi.com/#!q/iceland , http://colorapi.com/#!q/alps , http://colorapi.com/#!q/rainforest .

Wow Plumb Tree in particular got some amazing palettes back.

Been playing with random keywords. Beer came back with some amusing pictures but no color combinations I really liked.

Beer geek here, that's search term issues. If you're wanting traditional "beer colors" but not colors from logos and parties, try "malted barley" for an average yellow-orange beer color gamut, and "chinook hops" (a specific variety) for the greens you might expect.

MUCH better results, thanks!

Down ?

This is really nice -- much easier for a photographer like me to use that Kuler or the alternatives.

I'm asking because I made the decision to not use those on http://viewfinder.io/ based on the fact that I'm not a lawyer and prefer to err on the side of caution.

However, if it's not a legal problem to use copyrighted photos I could have much more data to play with, so I'm curious.

This is fair use, so the author's copyright wishes are not applicable. The copyright info applies to republication in full, not use in meta-analyses.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but doesn't embedding the photo in the colorapi.com page count as "republication in full"?

No more so than embedding it in a Google Images search.

What it comes down to is: has anyone filed a DMCA claim yet?

Taking colour hint out of photos should not be a copyright infringement (although lawyers can prove otherwise).

Great work. I did something like this and had it generate a sample website: a head, a content area, some tabbed navigation, a logo, and some headline colors.

I essentially quantized the image that was uploaded (I didnt use flickr) into 5 or 6 of the most obvious colours, then applied a little bit of math to determine which colours would work well together as well as adjusting the lightness (up/down) to help contrast.

It worked out okay. Maybe I should upload it? Your take on the flickr version is much, much cleaner than mine. Mine was a quick and dirty hack but was done as a learning experience.

Here's a screenshot using the UPS logo as an uploaded image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3731176/auto-ups-logo.jpg

Some background on the application http://www.bermi.org/announcing-colorapi-search-for-colors-i...

This is gorgeous. Woud love to read how you built it.

agreed

Does the image processing happen in a child process in node? I'm curious how your code does the heavy CPU without blocking node's main thread.

Yes image processing happens in a child process.

Right now I'm using GraphicsMagic resource limiting flag -limit for preventing it from taking down all the resources.

Cool. I noticed you're using Joyent too. I'm just starting a personal project on my own no.de smartmachine I got a few months ago.

Would what you're doing right now be possible using canvas on the client side?

On second thought, that might make things much more complicated / slow, you'd have to write something that allowed clients to send back processed results to speed things up for future searches by other users.

I wonder if there's any desire for something like http://maprejuice.com/, but easily applicable to any processing task that needs to happen in realtime * , as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

* But also support cached results.

PS If/when your no.de server crashes, do you have to push again to get it to restart? I was having this problem the other day — it's annoying to have to add a space to a file, commit and push just to restart the server.

I'm sure this can be done using Canvas. I might give it a try as a learning exercise in the future. Thanks for the suggestion :)

Didn't know MapRejuice, looks promising.

Regarding no.de, I have the same issues you describe. I'm looking forward moving to a larger SmartMachine where I can deploy using capistrano.

I have a couple of issues with the design.

1) http://i.imgur.com/uzsiH.png - overlapping text/controls on the homepage. Tried it in a few browsers. Width issue?

2) On the swatch pages, I'd make the controls just a little less translucent. Right now they're a little hard to see, though I grant that when you're used to the layout it becomes much less of an issue.

Other than those two minor points it's very nice website & I hope to use it in the future.

Thank you Michael for the feedback.

So far I've just tried it on FF, Chrome and Safari on Mac. Cross browsing is on my list.

Very well executed. My only question is whether you have any definite ideas for monetizing it, or just a project for learning and fun. Either way, awesome job.

Thank you!

This project is just for learning and fun. No ideas yet for monetizing it.

Small suggestion: when viewing one picture and its color scheme, put the “Hex RGB HSL HSV” text next to the radio buttons inside <label for="the_radio_button_id"> tags. This will provide a bigger hit-box for each choice by making the text and the radio buttons, not just the radio buttons, switch the color representation mode.

Is there anyway that you can specify a particular image, by entering the url of the image, for example?

Genuine question (if anyone knows): This isnt a mockery or complaint, i'm only an amateur DSLR photographer, but how does one actually take advantage of these color palettes. I mean, what can they actually do for me?

I think they are only useful to a designer which wants to extract color schemes from pictures he enjoys.

A guy here told us the other day that he did this "manually" with pictures he liked, for creating palettes for his projects.

I dont know if you use lightroom at all, but if say i want to create a preset filter, could this data be useful for that?

I often see photographs that have had color processing work done in Photoshop but can never quite seem to match them. I wonder if there is some way in which this would help(?)

Never used Lightroom, but the presets on http://goo.gl/wQ0PV seem to be formatted in json.

Seems like this presets can be created easily from a list of colors.

Interesting application.

I think it's Lua, not json. Lightroom being written in Lua an all.

Interesting. I'll have to explore this further. Thanks for the heads-up

Very nice site. I've used colr.org in the past, which does basically the same thing. I have to say, though, the UI on colorapi.com is much better. Good job! This site is bookmarked for use on my next web design project.

One feature request: the ability to upload images directly to colorapi.com.

Uploading images directly would allow designers to build a color palette to match a corporate logo, use the same color palettes as movies (by uploading images from http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ ), etc.

this is really great, well done. Finding some interesting colours from surprising keywords. http://colorapi.com/#!q/chipotle , http://colorapi.com/#!q/lapland (for some reason showing a quite nice scheme taken from a lego church), http://colorapi.com/#!q/athens

I've been playing around with node.js as well, lately. It really is very nice for trying new ideas.

Interesting idea, but I'm guessing the UI is severely broken on Firefox/Windows: all I'm seeing after a search is a long band of colours scrolling across a tiny part of my screen, with no apparent way to see what RGB values they are, which photo(s) they came from, or any of the other interesting-sounding things mentioned by other posters here. What should it look like?

I'm using FF on Win. I think you need to key in a search term at the top, and press enter, to see what others are seeing.

It's so beautiful!

Thank you

It would be really nice if I could middle-click "details" to open palettes in new tabs, or favorite palettes to come back to or even compare in a grid view later.

I'm also really confused about the swatch download. It tries to download as "default," and even if I change the file type to aco, I can't load it as a swatch in Photoshop.

I'll add favorite colors support in the future.

What browser/OS where you using when you had the download issue?

Opera 10.11 on Windows 7 x64.

A nice, gorgeous app. Definitely added to my collection. Interesting to see these different color schemes.

There's one particular thing which I liked was that, it stores previous search results. I wasn't expecting it in first place, But liked to see previous search results.

One more thing, will there be any API access to this service.

That's really nice, Bermi. Good job. So what resources did you find useful for learning to best use node.js?

Thank you!

I learnt Node.js mostly by looking at projects on github, reading Node.js API http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.4.2/api/ and following these two great resources http://howtonode.org/ and http://blog.nodejitsu.com

Any chance you could switch the rgb value to something we can easily copy/paste in CSS? rgb(128, 128, 128)

Thanks for the suggestion. I just changed it.

Stunningly brilliant. Develop a widget that other companies can put on their sites, and charge for it.

It looks great. I like how the settings controls are mostly invisible until the mouses over.

Here are some ideas for additional features:

1) Let a user load their favorites from Flickr and show the palette for each.

2) Create a bookmarklet than can be run on Flickr photo page to bring up the colorapi.com page for that photo.

Thanks for the suggestions this is something it will certainly work on.

This is honestly really cool. This reminds me of the Adobe Ideas iphone app that lets you import photos to get a color swatch (but still doesnt let you export them!!). I'm curious what you're using to host your app?

Thank you. The app is hosted on http://no.de Its a Solaris server with just 128RAM and 5GB HD

It would be cool if it had an API, like the picture url and palette in JSON.

I was expecting to see an API too, with the name being colorapi and all.

This is absolutely brilliant. The interface is very intuitive. Was node.js instrumental in making this work, or did you just want an excuse to learn it? (ie. rather than use a different server language)

Event driven development was instrumental. Back in 2007 I coded a similar project in PHP and had to take the app offline because it was painfully slow for end users.

I'm sure you can do something similar in any language by using something like RabbitMQ.

Sorry if someone already asked this, but could you release the source code for this project if it was just a learning experience for you? We could all learn from this and would appreciate it.

A great product.

I've been doing web design since 1997 and this is one of the most useful online tools for colour inspiration I've seen.

Your naming structure for the downloadable swatches is a nice touch.

This is a great tool to get colour scheme ideas from using 'real life' colour combinations. Well done!

Thank you!

Sweet - this is definitely getting bookmarked to use at work :) Very refreshing interface and flow.

Just typed in Brazil and loved the colors (and photos) returned. Thanks Bermi.

I am officially switching from kuler to colorapi!

sample searches always help

Very, very well executed idea, with one exception: hashbang URLs. Really? Reaallly?

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