lterpalettefinder Vignette

Overview

The lterpalettefinder package (LTER + Palette + Finder) was initially developed simply to house hexadecimal code color palettes manually extracted from photos taken at Long Term Ecological Research sites. During its development its purpose expanded to include a set of tools for automatically extracting those colors and visualizing the derived palettes.

This vignette describes the main functions of lterpalettefinder and demonstrates one possible use of its workflow from the extraction of a palette from a picture to the visualization of that palette.

library(lterpalettefinder)

Start with a Picture

The lterpalettefinder workflow begins with a picture from which you’d like to extract hexadecimal codes for the main colors (“main” is defined later). This vignette will use this picture of a prescribed fire in Iowa in 2018 (credit: Nick J Lyon) to allow for easy visual comparison between the source photo and the palette returned by the functions described below.

Extracting the Palette

The primary function of this package is platte_extract which accepts the name and/or path to the image file in your working directory. This function also includes an optional progress bar that is switched off in the example below

fire_palette <- palette_extract(image = "lyon_fire.png", progress_bar = FALSE)

The returned palette always contains the 25 most different colors (as identified by k-means clustering on the red, green, blue bands extracted from the image) stored as hexadecimal codes.

fire_palette
#>  [1] "#766e67" "#e3976d" "#6a9dda" "#c67d5e" "#585b5e" "#80919f" "#887665"
#>  [8] "#7d6b59" "#65696d" "#bdaf9e" "#a76a55" "#55463c" "#9f8f80" "#7d7c7b"
#> [15] "#675648" "#895343" "#97bfeb" "#6f6254" "#938272" "#473a33" "#41464c"
#> [22] "#585049" "#8ba5bf" "#d2c5b1" "#ad9e8e"

Viewing the Palette

In our experience, few people can look at a string of hex codes and instinctively interpret those as colors, so this package includes palette_demo and palette_ggdemo to demonstrate the extracted palettes. While there are some aesthetic differences between the plots produced by the two functions the fundamental difference is that ...demo creates a base R plot while ...ggdemo produces a ggplot2 plot. Additionally, palette_demo includes built in export options if desired

palette_demo(palette = fire_palette, export = FALSE)

palette_ggdemo(palette = fire_palette)

Organizing the Palette

You can also organize the colors into an order that approximates how human eyes instinctively group colors using palette_sort. The sorting isn’t perfect, but it is far easier to view similar colors than the random order returned by palette_extract

fire_sort <- palette_sort(palette = fire_palette)
palette_ggdemo(palette = fire_sort)

If desired, palette_extract does include a sort argument (defaults to “FALSE”) that can be activated. That said, it does take marginally longer to compute (~0.5 seconds) the sorting so if running palette_extract iteratively it will be faster to leave sort = FALSE until color sorting is necessary.

Simplifying a Palette

It may be the case that you’d want fewer than 25 colors from a given image but don’t want to have to go through and manually select the ones you want. palette_subsample randomly selects the desired number of colors from a vector of hexadecimal codes for just such an occasion! It also allows you to se the random seed internally for reproducibility

fire_sub <- palette_subsample(palette = fire_palette, wanted = 5, random_seed = 42)
palette_ggdemo(palette = fire_sub)

Using a Pre-Built Palette

The original impetus for lterpalettefinder was to allow users to select pre-set palettes and while the package has evolved beyond that, palette_find does serve this purpose. palette_find allows users to specify the site, number of colors, type of palette (e.g., sequential, diverging, etc.), and–if known–the name of the palette to identify and return an official palette.

official_palette <- palette_find(name = "hike")
#> Exactly one palette identified. Output cropped to only HEX codes for ease of plotting
palette_ggdemo(palette = official_palette)