tdicorcia - Thanks for the feedback and pointer to Stanford Cardinal red. I don't do any individual editing of the thesaurus itself but make use of the natural language usage of thousands of web volunteers to determine the names. I might also suggest that some people might use cardinal red to refer to the bird as well (which presumably is pretty close;)

jamurrell - I agree and am sensitive to the issue you raise. These results are based on the online color naming experiment but since I didn't collect any demographic information I am assuming that the participants that chose to use this color name probably could have been more specific. I suggest we assume the modifiers "light" or "caucasian" apply to the current results for "skin" and hope that with future versions, a potentially more diverse pool of participants and more sepcific names, that this assumption will not be necessary. Thank you for your feedback.

chromagirly - glad you like the tool, thanks. I will look at the spell checking portion of my processing to see how "torquise" was handled. I also hadn't seen "grandma" until you pointed it out ;)

In 2003, Nathan Moroney presented Unconstrained web-based color naming experiment, at the SPIE/IS&T Electronic Imaging Symposium. It describes a website he created (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/color-name-hpl.html) which invites visitors to submit names for 7 randomly chosen colors. These are collected, vetted, and averaged to create a color dictionary which can be queried at http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/color/archive/2007/10/29/4914.html.

Each query returns a color with its sRGB coordinates, a 3-level indication of how popular the name was, and four nearby named colors as well. By tracing the nearby colors, John Foster collected 871 named colors from the website.

Moroney's paper reveals that the randomly chosen colors have coordinates selected from only 6 values which are uniformly spaced from 0 to 255. But sRGB is not a perceptually uniform color space! This results in the dark colors being severely underrepresented among the colors presented for naming. The CNE RGB-cube shows artifacts of the limited dark samples: the darkest octant is nearly empty; and clumping is visible along the half-intensity axes.

Compared with the Resene-2007 RGB-cube, the CNE RGB-cube is seen to be distended from around the neutral (black-to-white) axis into saturated primaries which lie outside of the print (reflective) gamut.

The paucity of dark colors also hides some inherent technical issues. Coordinates for dark color names are likely to show more relative variation than the light colors because displays have more variation in contrast ratio, blackpoint, and dark color balance than they do in the highlights.

CNE-core-2007.txt is a subset of the CNE dictionary containing only the 212 "widely used", and "less commonly used" colors. Looking at its RGB-cube shows the darkest octant emptiness is worse than for the full CNE, perhaps reflecting that agreement between subjects is harder to obtain for dark colors.

The Color-Naming-Experiment could be improved by rewriting the webpage to:

* generate random colors with component resolutions of tens or hundreds of values, not just 6 values;

* generate random colors in a more perceptually uniform color space than sRGB, such as CIEL*a*b* or CIEL*u*v*;

* set the background color of the page. Moreover, using a black background would harness the human visual system to compensate for some of the differences in blackpoint, improving the agreement of darker colors.

All that being said, the Color-Naming-Experiment dictionary is still an improvement over X11. It is good for light sources and mediocre for surface colors.

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Thanks . Very well outtake on a rather complicated matter.

orange

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tamarillo

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sapphire

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