Use AI to turn your favorite film into a color palette

If you're seeking color inspiration from a distinctive-looking film like Grand Budapest Hotel, you could just "eyedrop" it in Photoshop or try an app like Adobe Color CC. He came up with Colormind, an AI algorithm that uses films, video games, fashion and art to "generate color suggestions that fit the distinct visual style of those mediums," he says. In coming up with his system, Qiao writes that he first looked at so-called color quantization (MMCQ), in which algorithms extract representative colors from images. However, those colors are often "haphazard" and not very useful for design, unlike human palettes that feature "similar hues grouped together ... and some minimum amount of contrast between each other," he says. To find a balance between the two, Qiao thought about using a fancy adversarial network deep-learning system, but instead "settled on a brute-force technique that I call generative-MMCQ."