Help with Junior High School Project

My daughter's chemistry group has asked me if something they want to accomplish is possible.

Is there a tool (software, or cheap hardware?) that will analyze a photo and give you a color content chart, or table, etc.?

For example, they want to upload/download a photo, and have it analyze and report out like so:

Red = 10%
Green = 20%
Blue = 14%

etc.

I hope you get the picture. Any help would be much appreciated

Freddy ..

I wouldn't think that there would be anything commercially available. Based on experience from learning C programming as an electronics engineering student in the mid 90's, it is the sort of thing that should be pretty simple to do with one of the scripting languages such as Python or Perl. Doing it with a JPEG image might be a bit hard, since you would have to uncompress the data and hold it in memory. Using an uncompressed 8 bit TIFF should be OK though, since it should be pretty easy to find the start of the image data in the file. All you would then need to do is read the value of each byte knowing which order each channel will be in just check the value of each of the three bytes against the ranges of values for each of your chosen colours and increment the relevant counter. Once you get to the end of the image data you just calculate the percentage of each colour against the total number of pixels.

If you are dealing with a group of bright high school aged kids I would hope that at least one of them has some programming skills in an appropriate language. Unfortunately I no longer have the C code and libraries that I used back then, nor a complier, or I would have offered to write something up for you in C. The lecturer was actually a biologist, and his research was in digital image recognition. So he provided us with a library that would read and write TIFF files, and our assignments were to write a range of image filters, sharpening, blur, and some basic interpolation filters were included. This was back in 93/94, when JPEG was a really new and clever format.

If I can supply any specific information that might help just drop me a PM.

Alan

Thank you for your input Alan.

I used to understand very well what you said, but it's been 5 years since I wrote any sort of code; now I just ask others to do it

I am glad to say though that we found this last night. I guess the saying is true; you can find anything on the internet!

The girls think this might do the trick; thanks again for your help.

Freddy ..

Does the RGB calculator have to be accurate, or will improper wb and other factors that go into the manufacturing of the jpg not matter?

I don't think that level of accuracy and precision is required, but they will check with the teacher next week and we'll go from there.

Try it. http://www.rapidtables​.com/web/color/color-tester.htm
255=100%