Hue extraction and tone match: generating a theme color to enhance the emotional quality of an image

Abstract

In the process of editorial design, a harmonious match between a picture and a solid color is often essential to achieve a high quality of a graphical art work. Color as such is a compelling cue to elicit emotional responses and thus can enhance the emotional quality of an image. Tools and methods have been developed to automatize the color selection process, and a noticeable progress has been achieved to extract perceptually dominant colors of an image. However, little attention has been paid to the emotional characteristics of selected colors, and it has been highly relying on the color designers' manual judgments. In this study, we propose a computational method that creates a color that enhances both aesthetic and affective quality of an image, and call it a theme color.