Most anyone who’s used iTunes’ album view will know about their color picking mechanism. I was curious about how this might be done and found this question on Stack Overflow: How does the algorithm to color the song list in iTunes 11 work?
So I set about creating an equivalent in PHP. I settled on using the IMagick PHP extension for grabbing pixel data and doing blurs.
The Results
Mizu (Water)
Tsuki (Moon)
Aki (Fall)
Chibi ^_^
The How
It’s largely based on the accepted answer given on the Stack Overflow question mentioned earlier. Except I separate potential highlights from the selected background based on a luminance ratio which produces more readable text, and there’s some additional logic for trying to pick contrasting highlight colors.
The Source
Source is available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/epb9000/image-color-dominator/ Not much in the way of documentation, so hopefully the comments on the class aren’t horrifically confusing. I’ll re-read them later and maybe make changes.
