distances {Polychrome}

Visualizing Color Palettes

Description

Functions that provide visualization of palettes to help determine appropriate contexts where thay can be used.

Usage

computeDistances(colorset)
plotDistances(colorset, main=deparse(substitute(colorset)), pch=16, ...)

Arguments

colorset

a character vector containing hexadecimal color values.

main

a character string, the main title for a plot

pch

Plotting character to use.

...

additional graphical parameters.

Details

Carter and Carter established the fact that, for two colors to be reliably distinguished, the Euclidean distance between their representations in CIE L*u*v* color space should be at least 40 units. The computeDistances function reorders the colors by maximal separation in L\*u\*v\* space, and computes the minimum distance of the next color to all the preceeding colors. The plotDistances function computes distances and immediately plots the result.

Value

The plotDistances function returns a list with two vector components: the colors in sorted order, and the minimum distances from each color to the set of preceeding colors. The computeDistances function returns the vector of minimum distances.

Author(s)

Kevin R. Coombes <[e-mail]>

References

Carter RC, Carter EC. High-contrast sets of colors. Applied Optics, 1982; 21(16):2936–9.

Coombes KR, Brock G, Abrams ZB, Abruzzo LV. Polychrome: Creating and Assessing Qualitative Palettes with Many Colors. Journal of Statistical Software. 2019; 90(1):1–23.

See Also

palette.viewers

Examples

data(alphabet)
plotDistances(alphabet)
luvd <- computeDistances(alphabet)