Explore Color

 

Explore ColorWhether you are a kitted out professional or an at home amateur, photography and image manipulation are among the most popular hobbies in the world. This passion to explore color has lead to the flourishing industry of online photo sharing that is now a huge part of the web and social networking. Facebook is the largest online photo sharing site and credits a large amount of its success to image sharing and tagging to strengthen users social networks. New York-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson quoted last year: “Facebook is a photo-sharing site, really. Maybe with some chat attached to it”.

With so much photo sharing services a common part of student life, here are 5 online tools that dig a little deeper than just tagging a friend.

Jump In And Explore Color:

 

MulticolrMulticolr Search Lab

Multicolr Search Lab lets students select a specific color or selection of colors up to a maximum of five. It will then retrieve images from Flickr that match the color map selected. This can be a great alternative search method to typing keywords, and is a fantastic image exploration tool as small changes can bring entirely different results.

 

Fractus MosaicImage Mosaic Generator

Image Mosaic Generator is a very basic tool to use but creates a really impressive final product to explore color. Most people would be familiar with image mosaics, where  many small images are collaged by color and pattern to form a single large image. With Image Mosaic Generator, it is simply a matter of uploading the large image you want to mosaic. The app will then collect and arrange random photos to create the final image.

There are more complex tools that will allow you select the library or photo type to use for the mosaic, but they are inherently more time consuming to produce. These mosaics are great for creating tributes to certain people or a creative way of presenting holiday photos.

 

PanoramioPanoramio

Panoramio is a long time photo sharing service based on photo geo-location rather than keywords or tags. It means students can explore maps of the earth or their local area and see photos that have been taken in certain locations. It is a great way to explore maps as well as find photographs from around the world.

A Panoramio (a Google product itself) layer can also be enabled in Google Earth to further enhance the feeling of exploration.

 

Tag BrowserFlickr Tag Browser

The Flickr Tag Browser is a really fun way to explore images. Type in a word and the browser will bring up a postcard of related images. It will also surround the images with related keywords to further enhance the search. This is a great way to find images when you are not quite sure what you want. The interface has also been created in a very interactive fashion so that younger students will find it simple and enjoyable to use.

 

Google Search By Image

Google image search has been around for a long time and is a very popular way to scour the web for photos. Around 3 months ago Google updated the search function so you can drag and drop an image into the search bar and return images that match the visual look. This is great when students are looking for the original source of an image or for images that are similar in appearance.

There are so many brilliant tools out there to manage, manipulate and search images… What does your class use to explore color?

 

Image courtesy of Flickr, Capture Queen ™

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