Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

It's always entertaining to try to understand these things from first principles. Color and skin color in particular are very complex things to measure and model. It's not just a physical quantity, it's also a matter of human perception based on lighting and a host of factors.

It seems like some work was done to research existing approaches, but I don't see any reference to Pantone Skin Tones [0]. Without intending to, I've worked on 3 different projects which involved measuring skin tones for makeup applications. The Pantone range is not 100% perfect, but it's pretty well done and easy to understand. There are two axes: a light/dark one, and red-yellow one [1].

[0] https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/skintone

[1] https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/pantone-skintone-guide-80945

There's also the Monk Skin Tone Scale by Dr. Monk and Google (available under a CC attribution 4.0 international license). It was developed for machine learning, so it's not exactly the same use case, but it provides 10 colors in a variety of formats, including hexadecimal. https://skintone.google/get-started

well its not a free as in beer color space

Pantone is not a color space. They are a supplier of physical color samples. Most pigments can be represented in a color space, but that representation differs based on illumination so it not unique. Some Pantone pigments, fluorescent colors in particular, cannot be represented by a color space at all!

Yup. This is a rabbit hole like time. Learn a little bit about it, know there's a staggering amount more and then any time you actually need it, check that you've agreed on as much detail as you needed for the task and not less.

The person inviting you to a picnic "next week" might need to know about Time Zones if they live some distance away. The requirement to update the CSS on the web site to match a new company logo might need to know about Colour Spaces. But that picnic invite doesn't care about Calendar systems or Leap Seconds, and the logo mandate doesn't care about Sub-surface scattering or a Quantum theory of light.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com