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Emergent Orange and Playboy Centerfolds

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016

(Spoiler alert, despite the title, this post contains no obviously nude images. Sorry!) This week I revisted a mystery that has been bugging me for several years. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you are probably familiar with my study emergent orange, a color that is produced when you make amalgam images by […]

Emergent Orange

Thursday, December 5th, 2013

Emergent Orange describes the orange hue that is produced when you average together a bunch of randomly selected digital photographs. The illustration shows 5 different sets of photos (randomly selected from Flickr) accumulating over successive rows. The first row is a single image. Then 2 images, 5 images, 25 images, and 100 images in the […]

The color of us (continued)

Friday, August 7th, 2009

In order to understand the MOB Brown / orange shift phenomenon I’ve discussed in the previous post and elsewhere, I produced a series of histograms, showing the relative proportions of images in each set that average to a particular hue. In this collection of photographs of poppy flowers, you can see a clear preponderance of […]

The color of us

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing some new research on the “MOB Brown” or “Orange Shift” phenomenon I first blogged about back in 2006. As part of that research, I’ve produced a number of intriguing composite images, which I thought I would share here. Before I proceed, I should acknowledge that some of this art resembles the work […]

Mob Brown

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

According to a recent post in the Flickr Blog the ‘favorite’ color of the Flickr community is a warm brownish taupe. The blog points to a nifty application, favcol which computes the average color of all the images on Flickr recently tagged ‘favcol’. In actuality, that brownish taupe color is what you tend to get […]