It's only really scientific insofar as it's based on a model. We basically make a big cube with R,G,B on its sides instead of X,Y,Z. Different approaches will then "smush" that cube to try to better match how humans perceive colors. Those different smushes will usually have some scientific thinking behind them (mine is based on... historical justifications, good post here btw). Then we move around the cube to find colors.
When I get a color, I try to match the luma too. Luma is itself a weird value, which tries to work through the relative perceptual brightness differences in colors.
The relative perceptual brightness difference is, as far as I can tell, the thing that really makes a color look "wrong" in a color scheme. I didn't solve that with problem with Strapless, but instead relied on whomever figured out luma. I think if you looked into how luma works you'd find the current best scientific model for whether two colors "fit" together.
I'd agree that color-generating isn't a science (definitely more of an art) but any good approach will have a bunch of underlying science and math.
There are some interesting in-depth articles about how people build those palettes and ramps that you might find interesting:
https://uxplanet.org/designing-systematic-colors-b5d2605b15c
What I'm looking for are empiric, preferably cross-cultural, studies on color harmony. I'm interested in work similar to what has been done for Unique Hues and Focal Colors but for combinations of two or more colors and for the notion whether people find these combinations pleasing, neutral or displeasing. I wouldn't be surprised too much if we couldn't find universal pleasing combinations but I'm surprised that apparently no one has done these type of studies.
HSL or HSV was a step up from RGB, so it made sense to use it to derive other colours quickly. Because if you're an underpaid freelance developer, the primary colour is usually set by the client, but they usually son't have a full colour scheme. Using a colour wheel based tool gave good enough results fast.
Not only are perceptual uniform models like CIE Lab*, and the derived CIELCh or CIEHLC mindbending to understand and code, but monitor colour gamuts sucked, and so it was overkill.
So is it scientific? If what you wanted was an easy way to derive a number of colours, sort of. If you need them to "look good", well that's art, not science. So ultimately, IDK what answer you're looking for. Colour wheels have always just been a nice way to visualise hue.
I'm not so much interested in "look good" but in "look pleasing or harmonious together" and I think that's a question science might have an answer to.
It's no coincidence that the palette generators borrow musical jargon. In music the definitions of minor second and perfect octave are completely uncontroversial. That these two intervals have different musical qualities, we call them dissonance and consonance, is uncontroversial too. Sure, some cultures use dissonant intervals heavily in their music but they still recognize the different qualities. Most importantly there has been a ton of research in this field.
Contrast this with the state of the art in color science: When it comes to color harmony there is not even a single universal definition of opposite or complementary. Look at the Wikipedia article about that topic [1]. It mixes up three completely separate topics:
1. Colors that when mixed together give a neutral hue
2. Colors that are opposite of each other on some wheel
3. Colors that supposedly have a certain effect, like contrast or harmony, when perceived next to each other
Color wheels are a dime a dozen. There is no shortage of claims that this and that color go well together but there doesn't seem to be any serious research.
I wonder if that is just my impression because it's not my field, or if maybe color science really is just not developed enough to tackle these kind of questions.
I have wondered the same thing ( https://ask.metafilter.com/245014/Help-me-understand-color-t... ) and haven't found anything.
I've had some subsequent thoughts. We know that there is a characteristic of the human perception of scenes called "color constancy". That is that our visual perceptual abilities are surprisingly robust to changes in the character of light sources. We may be aware of the light source color, but we easily "factor it out" of what we see of the objects in the scene. It is as if color constancy takes the distribution of colors and applies some transformation to standardize that distribution.
My guess is that the mechanisms underlying color constancy contribute to the aesthetic feel of the scene. If a scene's colors lie along a single line (e.g. a grayscale image), there is a sort of cramped or confined feeling (at least, I experience this), as if the color constancy mechanism is attempting to make a gaussian sphere* out of the colors but there's not enough variance to make it work.
At the same time, if you make a palette out of the corners of the RGB cube, there's an unusually high amount of variance. The image might be very vivid but it gives me an impression of excessive busy-ness or energy. The sphere has spikes now!
Maybe harmonious color schemes are those in which the color constancy mechanism doesn't have to do too much work to make the color distribution into a standard shape... maybe. I don't have any evidence or anything.
I don't think the "standard" distribution of colors that would feel neutral is actually going to be a sphere, but it's not going to be perfectly flat and it's not going to be a straight line. It is possible to visualize the color histograms of images as 3d point clouds to get some sense of what feeling is evoked by different color distributions (e.g. http://opensource.graphics/visualizing-the-3d-point-cloud-of... )
haha, right... but only for western music. compare it to e.g. Gamelan or throat/overtone singing. babies to have some concept of pitch, but mostly what sounds good is very much cultural and not "scientific" at all (good post on this: https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/11/12/the-emotional...)
Conversion from srgb to lab and back (through xyz) is a handful of functions, all under a dozen lines of javascript. Lab to lch and back are a pair of functions, about two lines of code each.
If you're implementing a user interface with sliders, you might also want to clamp the values to avoid producing out of gamut colours. The weird shape is probably the hardest thing to understand (user point of view), but the controls remain very intuitive.
> You might as well get the designer to do everything. We programmers should also publish articles like this: dont even bother with Excel formulas you need a programmer
I couldn't agree more.
No, not really. It’s mostly 17th–19th century pseudoscience, propagated by generations of uncritical art teachers. (Note: not all art teachers; some are amazing.)
Complementary colors (which mix to neutral when you e.g. paint two sides of a top with them and spin it) are a thing though.
I think both concepts are useful, but this article is a way better approach.
Our affinity to bright red is tied to how we used it to identify ripe fruit. Notifications, things they want you to click/grab/poke work best in red. You dont see many brown buttons on websites. We dont like touching brown the way we do red.
> This calculated and scientific approach to picking the perfect color scheme is extremely seductive, but not very useful.
Just recently I wondered if there is any scientific basis behind these approaches. I skimmed all research papers that I could find but not a single one of them provided serious data based support. All justification for these methods I found were historical, i. e. artists used color wheels and different methods of color selection on the wheels for a long time.
My conclusion so far is: There is no science what so ever behind these color palette generators.
I only spent about a day on this research and I'm not an expert, so if anyone has some pointers to serious research in that direction I'd be happy to know.