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It's so beautiful!
Thank you
Does the image processing happen in a child process in node? I'm curious how your code does the heavy CPU without blocking node's main thread.
Yes image processing happens in a child process.

Right now I'm using GraphicsMagic resource limiting flag -limit for preventing it from taking down all the resources.

Cool. I noticed you're using Joyent too. I'm just starting a personal project on my own no.de smartmachine I got a few months ago.
Would what you're doing right now be possible using canvas on the client side?

On second thought, that might make things much more complicated / slow, you'd have to write something that allowed clients to send back processed results to speed things up for future searches by other users.

I wonder if there's any desire for something like http://maprejuice.com/, but easily applicable to any processing task that needs to happen in realtime * , as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

* But also support cached results.

PS If/when your no.de server crashes, do you have to push again to get it to restart? I was having this problem the other day — it's annoying to have to add a space to a file, commit and push just to restart the server.

I'm sure this can be done using Canvas. I might give it a try as a learning exercise in the future. Thanks for the suggestion :)

Didn't know MapRejuice, looks promising.

Regarding no.de, I have the same issues you describe. I'm looking forward moving to a larger SmartMachine where I can deploy using capistrano.

I have a couple of issues with the design.

1) http://i.imgur.com/uzsiH.png - overlapping text/controls on the homepage. Tried it in a few browsers. Width issue?

2) On the swatch pages, I'd make the controls just a little less translucent. Right now they're a little hard to see, though I grant that when you're used to the layout it becomes much less of an issue.

Other than those two minor points it's very nice website & I hope to use it in the future.

Thank you Michael for the feedback.

So far I've just tried it on FF, Chrome and Safari on Mac. Cross browsing is on my list.

I think they are only useful to a designer which wants to extract color schemes from pictures he enjoys.

A guy here told us the other day that he did this "manually" with pictures he liked, for creating palettes for his projects.

I dont know if you use lightroom at all, but if say i want to create a preset filter, could this data be useful for that?

I often see photographs that have had color processing work done in Photoshop but can never quite seem to match them. I wonder if there is some way in which this would help(?)

Never used Lightroom, but the presets on http://goo.gl/wQ0PV seem to be formatted in json.

Seems like this presets can be created easily from a list of colors.

Interesting application.

I think it's Lua, not json. Lightroom being written in Lua an all.
Interesting. I'll have to explore this further. Thanks for the heads-up
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This is a great tool to get colour scheme ideas from using 'real life' colour combinations. Well done!
Thank you!
This is "minimum viable" done perfectly. Well done.

Personally, I'll use this for color schemes.

Check out http://colorapi.com/#!q/plumb%20tree , http://colorapi.com/#!q/iceland , http://colorapi.com/#!q/alps , http://colorapi.com/#!q/rainforest .

Wow Plumb Tree in particular got some amazing palettes back.

Been playing with random keywords. Beer came back with some amusing pictures but no color combinations I really liked.

Beer geek here, that's search term issues. If you're wanting traditional "beer colors" but not colors from logos and parties, try "malted barley" for an average yellow-orange beer color gamut, and "chinook hops" (a specific variety) for the greens you might expect.
This is really nice -- much easier for a photographer like me to use that Kuler or the alternatives.

I have a question though: is it cool to use "All Rights Reserved" images on Flickr for something like this? Clicking through some of the photos shows that they're marked as "All Rights Reserved".

I'm asking because I made the decision to not use those on http://viewfinder.io/ based on the fact that I'm not a lawyer and prefer to err on the side of caution.

However, if it's not a legal problem to use copyrighted photos I could have much more data to play with, so I'm curious.

This is fair use, so the author's copyright wishes are not applicable. The copyright info applies to republication in full, not use in meta-analyses.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but doesn't embedding the photo in the colorapi.com page count as "republication in full"?
No more so than embedding it in a Google Images search.

What it comes down to is: has anyone filed a DMCA claim yet?

Taking colour hint out of photos should not be a copyright infringement (although lawyers can prove otherwise).
A great product.

I've been doing web design since 1997 and this is one of the most useful online tools for colour inspiration I've seen.

Your naming structure for the downloadable swatches is a nice touch.

It appears to be down :/
Any chance you could switch the rgb value to something we can easily copy/paste in CSS? rgb(128, 128, 128)
Thanks for the suggestion. I just changed it.
sample searches always help
Great work. I did something like this and had it generate a sample website: a head, a content area, some tabbed navigation, a logo, and some headline colors.

I essentially quantized the image that was uploaded (I didnt use flickr) into 5 or 6 of the most obvious colours, then applied a little bit of math to determine which colours would work well together as well as adjusting the lightness (up/down) to help contrast.

It worked out okay. Maybe I should upload it? Your take on the flickr version is much, much cleaner than mine. Mine was a quick and dirty hack but was done as a learning experience.

Here's a screenshot using the UPS logo as an uploaded image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3731176/auto-ups-logo.jpg

Very well executed. My only question is whether you have any definite ideas for monetizing it, or just a project for learning and fun. Either way, awesome job.
Thank you!

This project is just for learning and fun. No ideas yet for monetizing it.

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This is gorgeous. Woud love to read how you built it.
It would be cool if it had an API, like the picture url and palette in JSON.
I was expecting to see an API too, with the name being colorapi and all.
It looks great. I like how the settings controls are mostly invisible until the mouses over.

Here are some ideas for additional features:

1) Let a user load their favorites from Flickr and show the palette for each.

2) Create a bookmarklet than can be run on Flickr photo page to bring up the colorapi.com page for that photo.

Thanks for the suggestions this is something it will certainly work on.
Pretty awesome for 4 days, IMO (I don't like how elements are ghosted out until hover, though). It really needs an "upload a photo" option.
A nice, gorgeous app. Definitely added to my collection. Interesting to see these different color schemes.

There's one particular thing which I liked was that, it stores previous search results. I wasn't expecting it in first place, But liked to see previous search results.

One more thing, will there be any API access to this service.

Sweet - this is definitely getting bookmarked to use at work :) Very refreshing interface and flow.
Very nice site. I've used colr.org in the past, which does basically the same thing. I have to say, though, the UI on colorapi.com is much better. Good job! This site is bookmarked for use on my next web design project.

One feature request: the ability to upload images directly to colorapi.com.

Uploading images directly would allow designers to build a color palette to match a corporate logo, use the same color palettes as movies (by uploading images from http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ ), etc.

Just typed in Brazil and loved the colors (and photos) returned. Thanks Bermi.