artutils

A modular Python library for extracting, generating, and visualizing color palettes directly from images. Created for digital artists, illustrators, designers, and anyone who wants to use image-driven color workflows with perceptual intelligence and ML-assisted tools.

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What Is It?

artutils helps you:

• Extract clean, meaningful color palettes from real images
• Generate full-spectrum gradients and complementary color schemes
• Visualize your color designs as swatches or wheels
• Create smooth blended palettes using Gaussian Mixture Models

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What's Inside (And Why It Matters)

Palette Extraction (palette_tools.py)

Why: Picking random pixels creates duplicates and noise. This tool:

• Uses color frequency
• Converts to perceptual LAB space
• Deduplicates based on Delta E (color difference)

Use it for:

• Building consistent palettes from reference art or moodboards
• Feeding a painting layer or UI theme system

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Clustering with KMeans / GMM (clustering.py)

Why: Hard clustering (KMeans) finds dominant color regions, while GMM captures soft overlaps.

Use it for:

• Logo and brand palette design
• Color structure discovery from photo datasets
• Creating refined palettes from photography

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Soft GMM Gradient (gmm_soft_gradient)

Why: Real-world transitions are fuzzy. This tool:

• Assigns pixels soft probabilities across color centers
• Blends colors based on those weights
• Produces smooth, loopable color wheels

Use it for:

• Background gradient generation
• Data viz color transitions
• Mood palette exploration for art

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Color Utilities (color_utils.py)

Includes:

• hex ↔ RGB ↔ LAB converters
• HSL gradient interpolation
• Opposite color generator

Use it for:

• Theme toggling
• Exploring lightness/saturation transitions
• Creating color harmonies and contrasts

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Visualization (visualization.py)

• Swatch row plots
• Circular polar color wheels
• Optional export to .png

Use it for:

• Portfolio graphics
• Color reviews with clients or teammates
• Visual debugging of generated palettes

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Project Structure

artutils/
├── __init__.py
├── io_utils.py
├── color_utils.py
├── clustering.py
├── palette_tools.py
├── visualization.py
└── examples/
    ├── clustering_example.py
    ├── palette_example.py
    ├── gmm_gradient_example.py
    └── visualization_example.py

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Coming Sometime in the Future: Soft Brush Texture Tools

I was actively prototyping a system to extract high-resolution brush textures from source images using:

• Local contrast enhancement (e.g., CLAHE)
• Texture descriptors like LBP + entropy
• Deduplication of visually similar tiles
• KMeans clustering to create grouped brush packs

Goal: help digital artists generate reusable brush alphas from skin, fabric, watercolor, etc.
This feature is paused for now but is planned for v2.

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Recommended: Use a virtual environment

To avoid dependency conflicts, we recommend using a virtual environment:

python -m venv venv_
source venv/bin/activate  # or .\venv\Scripts\activate on Windows

pip install artutils

Getting Started

Clone and install the library:

git clone https://github.com/aki-au/artutils.git
cd artutils
pip install -e .

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If you’d like to collaborate or feature this project somewhere, feel free to reach out!

PyPi Modular Package

https://pypi.org/project/artutils/1.0.0/ --> This is where you can download it through PyPi!

Medium Article (with Pictures and Stuff)