ColourVis: Exploring colour in digital images

The colour palette of painters over history has been of interest to many, including: art historians, archaeologists, and art lovers. Colour usage in art changes from culture to culture and season to season and is often thought of as reflecting or inspiring mood and ambience. We present ColourVis: a visualisation that supports exploration of colour usage in digital images. In particular, we use as a case study European art over the last six centuries. Visualising this relatively unexplored area offers insights into such questions as: How blue was Picasso's blue period?; How do realist painters' colour choices compare to that of surrealist painters; or How has the usage of colours changed over time? Through ColourVis we offer an exploration and comparison tool for individual paintings, groups of paintings and trends in colour usage over time.

Graphical AbstractFigure optionsDownload high-quality image (103 K)Download as PowerPoint slideHighlights
► The design and exploration of customisable banded histogram used to represent colour.
► The design and exploration of a customisable stacked line graph visualisation.
► A colour abstraction method that supports the comparison of two or digital images.
► A novel way to track the change of painter's colour usage over a career and/or painting genre or across time.