In case anyone is wondering how this works, it does a google image search and then extracts the primary color of each result. That’s why you see unexpected colors like grey for “heart”: image search returns black and white hearts.
My first search for "apple" gives you a bunch of greys and a red is only the 8th result. There's more grey, beige, a blue, black, yellow, orange, but only one green and 5 reds total.
Searching "heart" at least gives you a red first and majority reds.
Try "apples instead", all red and a single lime green.
It's amusing having a background in software development and this is the first thought I had. (like many here I am sure would) I don't know exactly "why" this works, but knowing that it likely would before trying. (like hitting refresh when your web app barfs)
Someone else suggested cause of the apple logo... and it seems they are likely right. :)
You can type nonsense words into this --- words for which Google will say no page in its entire corpus has a match --- and get color palettes back. What's it actually doing?
Looks like Google image search always has a fallback for a nonsense search query, and the images between Google and Picular exactly match (if you hover over the bottom-right of any color card, it shows the source image):
My guess is you're still doing a Google Image search, but when it returns no results, you return something random and cache this query for consistency. Is that about right?.
I was kinda disappointed when I realized when you search it seems to basically only do a simple image search (ala Google) and return the primary color of the individual images, as can be seen by hovering over the small icon in each color result.
I would not really call that machine learning, since it's basically an image search engine with a color filter.
...some of those four letter words won't return results, even if they do exist. Probably because they (futurememories.se) don't want to associate their product with lewd profanity, if/when people start sharing random links on social media.
I tried 'horse' (https://picular.co/horse) and I got some interesting results, some sky and grassy colours as well. Where do you get the photos from, and will searches give the same results every time or do they vary?
It's funny because if you scroll through Google images fast enough, you will catch glimpse of monochromatic placeholder images for images that haven't loaded yet. The placeholder image seems to be the average color (maybe with some object boxing to reduce contributions from backgrounds and such) inside the image. This website is kind of the opposite in that it presents the placeholder color as if it were the content itself.
Seems to be doing a google image search and take the average color. Meh.
EDIT: My "meh" is not bashing on the author or anything, at least they actually made a project, all I've done this past while is browse HN and make half-baked terminal apps. It was more of a let-down because I thought this was a very cool idea and was interested in a sophisticated implementation of it.
Neat! No greens returned in https://picular.co/christmas but OTOH I just created palettes called Retro and Grunge for a recent project and they were quite similar to Picular’s choices
I searched blue and it returned some tan and green colors (but not bluish green or greenish blue).
I searched naked, expecting skin colors (I was wondering if it would tend to show "white" skin colors instead of a range of skin colors). The results were... strange.
if you search "skin" you get more or less anticipated results. I think it's using safesearch-filtered results, so "naked" isn't likely to return any actual naked bodies.
If you are really looking for colours and palettes with a theme you are much better off with the groupthink at sites like https://www.colourlovers.com/
Nice. I tried Formula 1 constructors, and all those that I tried matched their liveries. Force India returned some pinks, Ferrari returned some reds, and McLaren some orange.
well, I just tried https://picular.co/hackernews which gives lots of orange, but doesn't seem to give me the color I get when I use a color picker on the top bar of FD6423
I typed in "Trump News" and I got a bunch of Fake Colors, none of which were anything like the correct shade of orange. They're shadow banning orange colors and right wing red colors, only showing dark left wing blue shades!!! Why are they censoring all the warm positive Trump colors??? All colors matter!!!
I put in some scientific proteins, and it spits out their common fluorescence staining colors:
ZO1 (stain tight-junctions, often blue): https://picular.co/zo1 (see https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1399&bi...)
hN1 (a protein usually stained red or green with GFP or mCherry): https://picular.co/hn1 (see https://www.thermofisher.com/antibody/product/HN1-Antibody-P...)