The colour of the year
Last week, the Pantone Colour Institute nominated their ‘Colour of the Year’ as they have done every year since 1990. The colour of the year is the Institute’s forecast of what colour we’ll all be wearing, buying, sitting on, painting with and loving for the next 12 months. For the record, in 2014, we were apparently loving ‘Radiant Orchid‘.
And what is this significant colour for 2015? It’s…Marsala (Pantone 18-1438).
Marsala? What the heck kind of a colour is marsala?
To me, marsala is a wine. A fortified Italian wine, which is sometimes used in a reduction sauce to create dishes such as chicken marsala or veal marsala. I just couldn’t quite imagine how the word marsala would translate into a Pantone colour. But thank goodness for Google image search. I typed the words ‘Pantone Marsala’ into a Google image search and my screen filled with photos of objects of a reddy-browny hue. Not quite maroon, not really brown, definitely not red. Something in between them all.
Interesting. Let’s watch and see if we’re all loving marsala in 12 months time.
Anyhow, it got me thinking. I wondered whether it was possible to somehow search the thousands of photos I’ve taken this year by colour. And what do you know? I discovered that Google’s Picasa photo software has that very feature.
I’ve known that Picasa has face recognition filters, which have an uncanny ability to identify faces in your photos and suggest who they are, but I wasn’t aware that if you dig around in the Tools > Experimental > Search menu you can find the ability to search the current gallery for all the photos that contain a particular colour.
Fore example, if you just want to see all your photos that feature red, go to Tools >Experimental > ‘Search for…’ and choose red. There are search function options for the abbreviated rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, plus a black & white photo option.
I have to say, I found the search function a bit hit or miss.
It picked up red photos easily, and from my 10,000+ photos from the past 12 months, it pulled up hundreds for me to select.
Yellow and orange were not so successful. Picasa found so few yellow photos, I gave up on the search function and manually picked out yellow photos to create the collage. It picked up a few more orange, but again I supplemented the selection with some I found just by scrolling through my photos.
Blue and green were easy finds. So many photos were brought up by the search function, that I was able to easily choose some for the collages.
I did find, however, that a lot of the blue photos were blue because of the sky, rather than because of anything particularly blue in the subject. Which makes sense, but I didn’t really want to make a collage of just sky shots, so I had to pick through the hundreds to select blue items.
I think the search function worked okay on purple, but I just don’t have a lot of photos of purple things! So it pulled up what it could.
Black and white turned out to be exactly that…old-school black and white photos. At least, that was all it selected of my photos. And it didn’t make for a particularly interesting collage. So, again I manually chose ‘black and white’ photos, just for the fun of having a black and white collage as well.
I think it’s a really interesting experience to view your year’s travels via colour. The photos in these collages were all taken within the past 12 months and are from: Western Australia, The Mornington Peninsula, Orlando, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York, Sydney, Palm Cove, Port Douglas, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Kyneton and of course, my hometown of Melbourne.
Selecting them, and creating the collages (I used Picasa’s Picture Collage function) gave me an opportunity to reflect on all the wonderful experiences we’ve had this year, and the incredible places we’ve been.
Overall, I’d say we’ve had a predominantly red kind of year. A bright, blazing, fire-engine red kind of year.
What colour has your year been?
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