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

619 points · 100 comments · automatoney

dahart · 1785869713 · focus · HN ↗
> What colors are we? The short answer is maybe something like “brown” and the long answer is very, very long.
Pete Shirley (author of Ray Tracing In One Weekend) is also a part time color scientist, and he clued me into the fact that if you crank the saturation to 100% of pictures of people of any race, the skin color comes out orange. I think I heard that some face detectors may work on this principle, but I don’t remember where I heard that.
1. madcaptenor · 1785872649 · focus · HN ↗
  and brown is just dark orange.
  1. dahart · 1785875670 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, true! Though cranking saturation doesn’t brighten colors (much… at least it’s not supposed to), and maybe interestingly, light brown isn’t quite orange. There might some asymmetry in color names.
    So it might not be that surprising that dark skin people turn orange when sat is cranked, but perhaps slightly surprising that light skin people do.
    Anyway, I suspect it’s computationally easier to turn everyone orange than brown. Plus, given that brown skin is already a category, orange could be useful terminology/category.
  2. adamhartenz · 1785876112 · focus · HN ↗
    And orange is just a yellow red.
    jagged-chisel · 1785892042 · focus · HN ↗
    Or a red yellow
2. mryingster · 1785876357 · focus · HN ↗
  And brown is just orange... with context.
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
3. a3w · 1785921868 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. mathgeek · 1785924976 · focus · HN ↗
    > There is but one human race.
    That’s also subjective. It’s taxonomically a subspecies. I find it best to keep that discussion simple rather than argue the pseudoscience argument.
  2. JuniperMesos · 1785927917 · focus · HN ↗
    Wikipedia has articles on the general concept of races of humans: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization), as well as on specific racial groups such as white people: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people and Asian people: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_people .
  3. binaryturtle · 1785928316 · focus · HN ↗
    Different word, same stupid concept.
    Also it would be one human "species", not "race".
  4. dahart · 1785937872 · focus · HN ↗
    > You mean ethnicity
    I meant race. We’re only talking about skin color here.
    “Today, race refers to a group sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history. Ethnicity refers to markers acquired from the group with which one shares cultural, traditional, and familial bonds.”
    <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/difference-between-race-and-ethnicity" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/difference-between-r...
    Race does exist (as does racism, unfortunately), and Wikipedia does have a page on race, as does any dictionary you choose. It would be a fair point that people should be sensitive to which word they choose based on context, and race is sometimes not the right word, but in this case it is the better choice, and the distinction in this context between race and ethnicity isn’t super relevant.
  5. jhgb · 1785939512 · focus · HN ↗
    People of different ethnicities can differ by something as minor as just language and language-related culture, such as for example Czechs vs. Germans. So surely ethnicity is not the applicable term here.

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