PUBLIC MARKS with tags couleur & python

Cinematographers often spend a great deal of time making color decisions for a given film. Sometimes these choices are subtle, but often enough there are segments of films that have strong color themes, and I was curious as to how to view this in a single image.

The trick is that PNG files are an easy to read, even from high level scripting languages like Python. So you can use the App Engine Image Manipulation Service to convert an image into a smallish PNG, then read the raw data using a pure python library like pypng:

To see all the color sorting possibilities, we wrote a Python script to try every permutation against a common set of source images. Click here to see every color sorting option. Note that we use a Hilbert curve in the top set of images to provide better grouping of similar color values. The bottom set of images is linear and wrapped: left to right, then top to bottom.