User:Waldyrious/palette

Reduced palettes from Munsell color system, value (brightness) 8.
 * Goal: obtaining a set of same-brightness, equally-spaced hues to use as colors for a syntax highlighting engine.

Background and process
I've been thinking a little about choosing a good color set for Remember the dot's syntax highlighter. I wanted to derive a good combination, rather than hand-pick a set that I think looks good.

Here's how I reached my proposal. My idea was to use colors that have the same perceived brightness (so they'll stand out from the white background by the same amount) and that are equally spaced in hue (again, perceived hue, not pure hue as in HSL). For this, I used the Munsell color system and (with the help of the Virtual Atlas), picked the plane of brightness 8 (the maximum is 9, but that's too dim). But that plane has lots of colors, very close to each other. I wanted to have only a few colors, and roughly equally spaced. So, using Photoshop, I exported the image into png-8 with several palette choices, relying on its algorithms (perceptive, adaptive, restrictive and selective) to group similar colors together in the most economical way (I set the maximum at 16 colors, since the syntax highlighter currently supports 14 different colors, and one of the 2 extra ones was going to be the white background anyway). I also exported each of these adding the web-snap restriction (which is what the "restrictive" option seems to do anyway), allowing it to auto-select the number of colors (it picked 18). I extracted the resulting palettes with pngcheck and generated this page with them, so I could test how they looked. It turns out the non-web-restricted colors (TO BE CONTINUED)

No color restriction
File: munsell_lightness8-16colors-adaptive.png

File: munsell_lightness8-16colors-perceptual.png

File: munsell_lightness8-16colors-selective.png

Only web colors
File: munsell_lightness8-16colors-restrictive.png

File: munsell_lightness8-18colors(auto)-restrictive.png

File: munsell_lightness8-18colors(auto)-adaptive/perceptual/selective+websnap.png

All web colors combined