Take a satellite image, and extract the pixels into a uniform 3-D color space. Then run a clustering algorithm on those pixels, to extract a number of clusters. The centroids of those clusters them make a representative palette of the image. Here's the palette of Chicago:
The R package earthtones by Will Cornwell, Mitch Lyons, and Nick Murray — now available on CRAN — does all this for you. Pass the get_earthtones function a latitude and longitude, and it will grab the Google Earth tile at the requested zoom level (8 works well for cities) and generate a palette with the desired number of colors. This Shiny app by Homer Strong uses the earthtones package to make the process even easier: it grabs your current location for the first palette, or you can pass in an address and it geolocates it for another. That's what I used to create the image above. (Another Shiny app by Andrew Clark shows the size of the clusters as a bar chart, but I prefer the simple palettes.) There are a few more examples below, and you can see more in the earthtones vignette. If you find more interesting palettes, let us know where in the world you found them in the comments.
Will Cornwell (github): earthtones
The pallet created at Haywood Community College (185 Freedlander Dr, Clyde, NC or 35.525357, -82.928087) is a beautiful pallet of lush greens. Thanks for this.
Posted by: David Onder | September 08, 2016 at 05:59