eyedroppeR

There are fancy ways to extract colours from images but sometimes it’s easier if you could simply click on the image and choose the colours you want.

With eyedroppeR you can click on the image and it will return the hex codes of the selected pixel all within R.

Installation

devtools::install_github("doehm/eyedroppeR")

Usage

Use eyedropper with the following steps:

1. Find the image you want to pick colours from online. Local images cn be used as well.

2. Right-click and ‘copy image address’. As an example copy the following image (right-click > copy image address).

   

3. Choose how many colours to pick e.g. n = 8.

4. Run eyedropper(n = 8, img_path = '<paste address here>', label = "Sunset on the South Coast").

5. If it’s the first time you have run eyedropper complete the calibration setup. It only needs to be done once, just click the top dot and then the bottom dot. (This is temporary until I find an automated way to do it that works for everyone’s system setup. It only takes a few seconds, and trust me it’s more efficient than selecting the wrong colours and trying to work out why.)

   

6. Click the 8 desired colours. You can click on either the image itself or the swatch at the bottom. The image will be stretched to the borders of the window, but that’s OK.

7. Done! Copy the returned string and add it to your script and start using pal.

   

The palette, image that is saved at the temporary address, and the label will also be returned by the function. It will also output to console a message that can be copied and pasted directly to your code. That’s the best part!

Use pixelate to easily select the right colour

By setting pixelate = TRUE the original image will be converted to a low resolution so that it’s easily to select the right colour. The default pixelation is set to 40 (pixels on the x and y). You can adjust that higher or lower as needed.

eyedropper(n = 5, img_path = '<paste address here>', pixelate = TRUE)

When pixelate is the swatch banner at the bottom won’t be displayed because it’s not really needed.

Automatically extract a palette with extract_pal

To speed up the process and if you’re not looking for specific colours you can run extract_pal to automatically select some for you.

library(eyedroppeR)

path <- "https://github.com/doehm/eyedroppeR/blob/main/dev/images/belize.jpg?raw=true"
extract_pal(12, path, label = "Caye Caulker, Belize")

caye_caulker_belize <- c('#477d7c', '#4f967e', '#a1d6f5', '#cbe8f4', '#f0e4c6', '#d8c09c', '#adae46', '#a6954f', '#e14f16', '#a92613', '#cf4959', '#d78462')

$label
[1] "Caye Caulker, Belize"

$pal
 [1] "#477d7c" "#4f967e" "#a1d6f5" "#cbe8f4" "#f0e4c6" "#d8c09c" "#adae46" "#a6954f" "#e14f16" "#a92613"
[11] "#cf4959" "#d78462"

$img_path
[1] "C:\\Users\\Dan\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\RtmpIN1NcN\\file70302f63b83"

Often you won’t quite get what you’re after and you’ll want to use eyedropper instead.

Use swatch() to view a palette

path <- "https://github.com/doehm/eyedroppeR/blob/main/dev/images/belize.jpg?raw=true"
x <- extract_pal(4, path)

swatch(x$pal, path)

Other functions

• sort_pal: Allows you to manually sort a palette by clicking on the colours in order. It also allows you to select a specified number of colours if you don’t want them all.

• show_pencil_case: There are a bunch of palettes stored in the pencil_case. This will plot them all so you can easily choose the one you want.

• palette: Helper to read a palette from the pencil_case. e.g. palette(1)

Palettes in the pencil_case

show_pencil_case()