The color of every photo on the internet blended together is orange

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/the-color-of-every-photo-on-the-internet-blended-together-is-orange/378614/

by krazydad • 12 years ago

55 63 12 years ago

theatlantic.com

qiqing• 12 years ago

It's the color of incandescent bulbs, fire, and other popular sources of light, reflected off of a large variety of surfaces.

anon4• 12 years ago

Also the colour of a human, the most photographed animal on the planet.

Stwerp• 12 years ago

The article addresses that and intentionally chooses non-human subjects such as walls of graffiti. These still show his `emergent orange' effect.

At first I assumed it was his averaging technique, but I'm more apt to believe it has to do with the spectrum of light which is being `sampled' by the selection of photos.

derrasterpunkt• 12 years ago

So the color could change in the next years with the emergence of fluorescent lamps, LEDs and cold cathode lighting.

baddox• 12 years ago

Don't most of those newer lighting technologies usually try to imitate the color temperature of traditional lighting?

egypturnash• 12 years ago

This is pretty much what I was coming here to say.

Don't forget that we live under a yellow sun, too. There is a hell of a lot of warm light in our world, natural and artificial.

MrRage2• 12 years ago

Sun is actually white... which is why you see a all the colors in a rainbow. I know Superman lied to you. :)

invertedohm• 12 years ago

Exactly. The simplest explanation in my mind is that it's a white balance issue. Most photos are taken in some form of daylight, which is generally in the orange range without a pure white on a "correct" exposure. On average, photos will be taken in warmer (orange) rather than colder (blue) tones.

It would probably even work on a bunch of photos taken of a white wall in some natural light, if you averaged them out. More of an orange hue than pure white, certainly.

Rangi42• 12 years ago

That's what I thought of too. It could be tested by averaging a pool of images lit by fluorescent bulbs, LEDs, or LCD monitor glow.

hazz• 12 years ago

This wouldn't explain why the same effect was seen from photos of graffiti (which presumably were outside, in the day.)

"When someone told him that it was probably due to the colors of flesh in photographs, he tried it with a pool of graffiti. Still orange. "

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

I'm curious how much exposed wall was included in those pictures. Graffiti is vastly more common on brick and concrete surfaces, which 99% of the tie are red, yellow, cream, or gray. Regardless of what color the graffiti is, if there's a lot of backdrop behind it I'm not at all surprised that it'd average to orange.

Pick something else like "pictures of forests" instead of "pictures of graffiti" and suddenly your average stops being orange because you're not taking photos of buildings anymore.

krazydad4• 12 years ago

It is perhaps worth pointing out that I observed the same effect in collections of purely synthetic art (such as Fractals).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/3794489938/in/set-721...

While I don't think this rules out light as a possible culprit, it perhaps implies that humans are mimicking the natural world when they are making color choices.

diminish• 12 years ago

i m using a ruby gem, color, to mix, blend colors. There are so many parameters and methods you may use to blend 2 colors. So i think, you may attain not only orange but other colors too deoending on how you blend

Someone• 12 years ago

looking at lists of RGB color names (e.g. http://cloford.com/resources/colours/500col.htm, http://www.keller.com/html-quickref/4a.html, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names) I notice that everything called 'orange' has a blue component of zero.

So, this claim would imply that the average color in nature doesn't have a blue component.

I guess the conclusion must be a) the sky is blue, and b) the majority of photos on the internet does not show sky.

0x0• 12 years ago

Also, the common rgb->greyscale algorithm has a very low factor for the blue component (0.21 for r, 0.72 for g, 0.07 for b was one of the first on google)

yvsong• 12 years ago

I wonder what the average color of all web pages is, and that of all smart phone app icons.

Edit: web pages should be weighted by page views, and app icons by downloads.

pariya• 12 years ago

My guess is that the average smart phone app colour is blue.

TheLoneWolfling• 12 years ago

If you're weighting by page views, you could get a pretty good approximation by just taking screenshots of the top 10000 or so websites.

beejiu3• 12 years ago

I'm a little dubious about interpolating RGB values in that way -- I don't think averaging the numbers directly maps to the real world colour mixing you'd observe. I'd be interested in what the result is in Lab colour space.

klodolph4• 12 years ago

Ah, that's problematic.

The RGB color model is closely modeled after the physical phenomenon of light. In a linear RGB color space, you can average two colors to get the same result as if you had physically averaged those colors in the real world by combining light.

However, Lab is modeled after the subjective human perception of light and color. Lab is divorced from physical interpretations. Averaging colors in Lab does not have any real physical interpretation.

shkkmo2• 12 years ago

"The RGB color model is closely modeled after the physical phenomenon of light."

Not actually true. RGB is modeled after the mechanism by which humans perceive colors (using red, blue, and green photoreceptors).

If you mix Red and Blue light, you still only have Red and Blue light, but the human perception system will perceive purple light, even though there is no EM radiation at the 'purple' frequency.

beejiu3• 12 years ago

But, if you mixed (0, 0, 255) blue and (255, 255, 0) yellow, you get (127, 127, 127) grey. But blue and yellow doesn't make grey in the physical world.

peter303• 12 years ago

The color of the Universe is white-green according to this analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte

sp3327• 12 years ago

they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper,[1] in which they reported that their survey of the color of all light in the universe added up to a slightly beigeish white.

svantana• 12 years ago

I don't understand why it's presented as such a mystery? The average color obviously exists, and if I had guessed it would be a reddish/yellowish gray (due to the ubiquity of incandescent lighting, the non-UV-reflecting properties of surfaces etc).

I was hoping to also see a covariance matrix, or maybe even a 3d histogram of pixel colors on the web -- that would be interesting. This person is clearly not a data scientist :)

willvarfar3• 12 years ago

Hmm, are you really sure that, had you been asked without reading the article, you'd think the average colour to be reddish/yellowish gray due to lighting and ... etc? Really really?

If I'd been asked, I'd perhaps have tried to be clever and said that the top half of the image would be blue as the sky is blue and indoor walls are usually white which won't hurt the blue so much, and that the bottom half would be a browny green due to grass and carpet etc.

GhotiFish• 12 years ago

This is not to toot my own horn here (I would of expected graduations as well due to the sky and the ground), but I think I would of said It would of tended to orange, on the grounds that (and this is just my suspicion) people find a more orange hue a more pleasing whitebalance. What is online is what has been shared, and what is been shared will invariably be pleasing to the people that shared it.

Obviously, this is just another explanation.

Actually I would of liked to of seen some of those aggregate photos. Maybe there WERE graduations!

edit: wish granted!: http://jbum.com/papers/EmergentOrange_paper.pdf

some of his sample sets did produce graduations, in particular vignettes and lighter at the top darker at the bottom themes.

in defence of my statement is figure 10

  Figure 10. Averages of four different pools of digital 
  abstract art found on Flickr. Pools used: Processing, 
  CGArt, Computer Art Creations, Generative and 
  Evolutioanry Art

for some reason he produces a surprisingly orange result, and still believes that the overall orange hue may be due to:

  4) It’s caused by chemistry & physics. The amalgam photos 
  are functioning as a kind of mass spectrometer, 
  reflecting the average chemical composition of the
  subjects being photographed.
  
  [...]

  I find #4 the most convincing. It is not necessarily 
  mutually exclusive with some of the others (e.g. the
  chemistry of the earth/sun affects human choices and 
  camera design).

Meh.

krazydad4• 12 years ago

There's definitely some interesting things going on with human reasoning in the way different people interpret the result. I originally assumed the images would average to gray, but when I think about it logically, that would be kind of miraculous. We wouldn't expect a bunch of photos taken on Mars to average to gray (to be perfectly balanced in R, G and B), so why did I expect photos taken on Earth to? It would mean all the colors are in a very precise balance, which would be kind of odd.

With random images which include a few outdoor photos, there is a noticeable effect from the sky, but not as dramatic as I might expect - it tends to produce a whitening, rather than a visible blue.

kaoD2• 12 years ago

The color is normalized. Before normalization, it is gray :)

benhardy• 12 years ago

Well thanks a LOT, John Boehner.

nostromo• 12 years ago

http://www.chm.davidson.edu/vce/coordchem/spectrum.jpg

Orange is near the middle of the visible spectrum.

Strilanc2• 12 years ago

The averaging is happening in RGB space, not an HSV-esque space. There's no obvious reason to expect the hue to end up averaged.

For example, the RGB average of red and blue is not orange; it's pink or purple.

sp3327• 12 years ago

But the world isn't in RGB space. If you take a bunch of samples in the whole color spectrum, then approximate them each into sRGB, the average probably won't move that much.

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

Actually the article is confused on this very point. I think it's actually implied that it's sampled in HSV and not weighted for saturation or value.

Edit: his blog entry implies RGB, and it looks like the average color is actually brownish grey, which would be highly unsurprising to anyone who has mixed paint.

socceroos• 12 years ago

I'd say that a large part of their sample source was instagram, where every hipster known to humanity gathers to share their sepia saturated abominations.

spion• 12 years ago

Here is a possible explanation: most digital camera makers tweak the color balance towards warm rather than cool or neutral because consumers prefer that.

willvarfar3• 12 years ago

Strange, I can't repeat the results on various folders I have.

I wrote a quick little (slow) Python script to compute a blended photo: https://gist.github.com/williame/92c7179d0963553d605f

If a folder has some theme, such as a folder I have of a boat regatta, I get an average picture that looks as you'd expect. So the code seems to average correctly.

If I run it on a bigger assemblage of photos, I tend to get a uniform gray though.

What am I doing wrong?

(I encourage you to try yourself!)

sp3327• 12 years ago

Maybe you should include lots of faces? And check that you're doing sRGB gamma math correctly. http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch24.html

Edit: I'm guessing convert("RGB") means convert from whatever to linear RGB? So that part should be fine.

willvarfar3• 12 years ago

And yet the article says its not to do with the colour of flesh etc..

krazydad4• 12 years ago

Hi, this Jim, the subject of the article. The Atlantic article omits that I'm normalizing the result (otherwise, the histogram is clustered in the middle and you get a dirt-brown color -- the hue is orange, but it's very desaturated). Here is pseudo-code in Processing showing what I'm doing:

To avoid floating point rounding issues, I process the pixels in integer space. For each channel (R,G,B) I create an 1D array of integers (one integer for each pixel) and initialize them to zero.

smaxPixels = width*height; srmap = new int[smaxPixels]; sgmap = new int[smaxPixels]; sbmap = new int[smaxPixels]; for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) { srmap[i] = 0; sgmap[i] = 0; sbmap[i] = 0; }

For each pixel in each image, I add the pixel value to the sum for the corresponding pixel (in the below code, 'offset' is typically zero).

  for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) {
    int px = sImage.pixels[i];
    srmap[i] += red(px);
    sgmap[i] += green(px);
    sbmap[i] += blue(px);
  }

I then produce a normalized image by finding the minimum and maximum components, and mapping all the pixel sums to that range.

for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) { minValue = min(minValue, srmap[i]); maxValue = max(maxValue, srmap[i]); minValue = min(minValue, sgmap[i]); maxValue = max(maxValue, sgmap[i]); minValue = min(minValue, sbmap[i]); maxValue = max(maxValue, sbmap[i]); }

  pg.beginDraw();  // pg is an offscreen Image buffer I am going to draw into...
  pg.loadPixels();
  for (int i = 0; i < smaxPixels; ++i) 
  {
    if (maxImagesPerTile == 1) 
      pg.pixels[i] = color(srmap[i],sgmap[i],sbmap[i]);
    else
      pg.pixels[i] = color( map(srmap[i],minValue,maxValue,0,255),
                       map(sgmap[i],minValue,maxValue,0,255),
                      map(sbmap[i],minValue,maxValue,0,255));
  }
  pg.updatePixels();
  pg.endDraw();

That's the essence of it. The bright "orange" is a normalization effect. Note that if I were to simply "average" the images without the normalization step, the resulting color is generally a dirt-brown. Normalizing the image has the effect of increasing the saturation and the contrast, without affecting the hue in an HSL sense. I discuss this in my paper, although the Atlantic article omitted this important point.

kaoD2• 12 years ago

Your grayish results are exactly what I would expect from averaging RGB values.

roberjo• 12 years ago

When you blend in 100M 'spacer.gif' images, it can skew the result.

freshbreath• 12 years ago

I tried making a site to auto-blend images from Google Images…

https://github.com/derv82/ImageBlender

http://blen.derv.us

Last time I checked, it didn't work 100%, and was laggy.

But I learned bootstrap in the process, and some of the quirks associated with HTML5 canvas.

rukittenme• 12 years ago

We need to throw out the spray tan selfie outliers.

The color of every photo on the internet blended together is orange

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