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Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

https://toneyalexander.github.io/inclusive-color-space/
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This is beautiful work! First, I thought this would involve using PCA to go from 3D to 2D, which would result in an easier selector to use, but at the expense of representing every person.

Then, I thought this would stop at using the U-space vectors (the ones that form the basis of the PCA image) and their corresponding ellipse to form our color space, but no, the function fitting is a very slick idea, even if it was executed by hand.

Lastly, I love the presentation of sampling from different r values. Whether you sample from a fixed r value or a range of r values, I bet this has great applications in game design or animation.

I still don't quite get the manual data labeling process at the beginning? It seems like it would encode some bias, but the consistency of the first point cloud and the results certainly speak for themselves.

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Nice. Most of these colors look right to me, but I'm also seeing green, blue and purple? If you're curating colors from the space manually then it's not a problem.

"Only realistic colors" would be a different problem. And I'm not sure if there's a way to solve that problem without excluding some real colors too.

(Maybe if the colour selector was a different shape? I don't know much about color spaces.)

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Love it. I especially thought the introspective “aside” section on related resources was great, and I wish more people would show this kind of reflection.
Thanks! I hope to send lots of love those ways, they're basically all things that I found outside of this work that I liked enough to remember (I think Humanae was the one that I found while doing this).
I definitely don't speak for all non-white people when I say this, but personally I find people obsessing over it disturbing/offensive independent of whether their intentions are racist or anti-racist. I did find modeling/data-driven perspective cool though
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This is super cool! I have always loved projects that try to categorize color space. Usually my work has gone in the other direction - isGray, isCloseToWhite, isPastel - but it's the same insofar as it's defining shapes like your matplot visual.

Wish I had this on hand like this three or four years ago when I was working on VR avatar software - we had hard-coded skin tone options at the time - would have been a cool addition!

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Very neat project. Could I use this code to generate skin tones in my own project? Or more meant to just be educational/inspirational? I guess I'm wondering if you've considered adding a license.
Good catch, added MIT license - feel free to use it! On top of that, my understanding is that math/equations are not subject to copyright, so the core part of this work (the equations/ideas) I think legally has 0 limitations - even if there were a restrictive license. But IANAL so might have some misconceptions.
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For anyone confused, turn off your dark mode extension. :)
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This is excellent work! You’ve got a 49 year old and a 10 year old equally into it. That’s impressive - nice work.
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Interesting.

It might be a bit biased though, as there's much more variation on fairer skin tones than on dark ones (there's only one that looks like the colloquial "black").

This contradicts all research and social media from the past decade.

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Seems to underrepresent pale skin tone variety
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