Building Palettes From Pictures In R

Andrea Cirillo takes inspiration from the great works to build palettes:

If you see this painting you will find a profound of colours with a great equilibrium between different hues, the hardy usage of complementary colours and the ability expressed in the “chiaroscuro” technique. While I was looking at the painting I started, wondering how we moved from this wisdom to the ugly charts you can easily find within today’s corporate reports ( find a great sample on the WTF visualization website)

This is where Paletter comes from: bring the Renaissance wisdom and beauty within the plots we produce every day.

Introducing paletter

PaletteR is a lean R package which lets you draw from any custom image an optimized palette of colours. The package extracts a custom number of representative colours from the image. Let’s try to apply it on the “Vergine con il Bambino, angeli e Santi” before looking into its functional specification.

It’s an interesting package.  I’ll have to play around with it.