COLO 150

Photobook

The colours of urbanisation in the world

So 100 or 150?

Scientists have used different ways to determine the number of colours and shades that humans can recognise. They now agree that there are about 150 000 shades of colour. In this case, the human eye can usually distinguish 100 shades of colour in the colour background. The ability to recognise more colours can be trained. In the field of art people working in the arts can distinguish between about 150 colours, up to about 25 shades of colour saturation, at a maximum of 64 light levels.
The numbers given may vary depending on the individual's level of training, physiological condition and lighting conditions. For example, under certain conditions a person can distinguish between about 500 shades of grey.

associated separately and together

DECOMPOSITION OF COLOURS

A colourful scene can always have a big impact on our mood, our behaviour and create a vibrant experience, so a colour can also evoke a sense of place. By itself, a colour is not always associated with a place, for example: the combination of blue and yellow, which separately may not necessarily make us think of the beach, but together are more likely to do so and are just two of many colours.

How can the relationship between sense of place and colour be mapped onto the urban environment?
The tones of some colourful cityscapes can harmonise with each other to encapsulate the feel and look of the city.

There are many and complex contexts for analysing the relationship between the colour mood of a city, such as geography, history, culture and tradition, to name but a few. Colour is an important element of the urban landscape that intuitively represents the cityscape and vividly shapes the personality of the city.

places in eastern and central europe

In the COLO 150 project, I explored and analysed similarities and differences in colour characteristics between cities to determine the independent character of each city, testing the non-location theory of whether a just randomly selected cityscape can truly be identified as a city almost anywhere in the world. In addition, I analyzed the characteristics of the colors of the cities as a group occurrence and hierarchy. However, the selected images also contain additional and other information. Therefore, the results depend strictly on how I, as the creator, interpreted the content of the image and how I chose the colour range of the image.

RGB >> HSV >> CMYK

The colours of a city of millions can be influenced by artificial and natural light sources, so there are artificial and natural colours. The most dominant colours are the sum of all the colours of objects visible in public urban spaces (e.g. buildings, vegetation, traffic). Some cities calculate the extraction of their main colours from the colour and and the corresponding composition ratio.

I chose the HSV color space as the base color context to achieve "physical space-computer-visual perception", thus reproducing the colours seen by the human eye. Notably, this color space is the closest to human color perception and description methods.