The software has two functions. One, given a color (one of the 225) it highlights areas of the reference image that are "close to" that color, so I can draw them all at once. It has some bugs, particularly with the dark greys and browns, so I have to ignore it sometimes. Two, given a screenshot of my work-in-progress and the reference image, it highlights areas that have the greatest color difference. Again, it has trouble with very dark and very bright colors. The limitations of this method are clear: it takes forever, and my skill doesn't seem to be improving. I like the results that I obtain with it, but I'm becoming more convinced that it's too much of a crutch. I need to draw things right, with the pencil sketch, then inking the boundaries, finally coloring it in properly in a logical manner, back-to-front, then do the crosshatching in areas where I need to blend better. I think that, once I practice, that method will actually be faster, and I can rely on my art skills instead of leaning on the program and making it the core of my work.
it's written in the c# dialect of Microsoft .NET, and it uses an existing image toolkit. I originally wrote it to compare colors by the intensity of the red, green, and blue subpixels that the computer uses. But often the computer's estimation of what's "close" is far off from what the human eye perceives. So I did a bit of research and switched to comparing differences in the "YUV" color space, used by the old analog TV signals. It's closer to the human eye but still suffers a bit especially for extremely bright or extremely dark colors. It looks like I'd get better results by converting the colors to the "CIELAB" color space, but that's a ton of work that I haven't felt like doing yet.
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