Palette Inspiration lets you browse, search, and filter color palettes extracted from ~3000 Old Masters paintings, capped at 10 colors per palette with prevalence weighting.
Key Takeaways
Covers roughly 3000 historical artworks; palettes are extracted algorithmically using color quantization down to 10 dominant colors per image.
Each palette includes a color prevalence scale, giving designers a relative weight for each extracted hue.
Browse and filter by artist, art style, and movement; a letter directory and style tags are the primary navigation paths.
Coverage is focused on Old Masters and historical painters; contemporary and modern artists are not included.
Hacker News Comment Review
A core validity concern: colors extracted from aged paintings reflect oxidized varnish and faded pigments, not the artists’ original intent, limiting the palettes’ accuracy as historical references.
The extraction method mirrors a well-known ImageMagick quantization approach (quantizeImage + uniqueImageColors); the builder adds prevalence weighting as the main differentiator.
Several UX bugs were surfaced and patched quickly: “Naïve Art” filter broke due to the diaeresis character, “Modernism” and “Modernismo” were duplicate categories, and the letter directory sorts by first name rather than surname.
Notable Comments
@afolkest: Committed to weekly use in art practice; asked for an API endpoint, signaling practical demand beyond casual browsing.
