Sorting Hexadecimal Colors
I’m currently working on a poster/catalog for an upcoming curatorial project at the Bemis Underground and was thinking of using an image of sorted white noise on a television set. Grayscale white noise is actually pretty boring (so long as it’s actually close to random, the values will fall along a Gaussian curve), so I tried some other experiments.
Using hexadecimal color yielded some pretty interesting results. The above image is 1,296,000 random values that range from #000000-FFFFFF (0 - 16,777,215). A Processing sketch sorts those values numerically and fills the pixels of the image in order.
Click here, or on the image, for full-resolution.
Also of interest were Photoshop’s histograms of the color – I’ve not really looked at histograms much in the past, but these were really strange. Luminosity was, as I suspected, a Gaussian curve and RGB values were each close to a flat line. But overall “color” resulted in the above images. The top is the raw image, the one below after “Auto Color” correction: 8-bit fortress meets birthday cake.
