SO. I just found out from tag group:art that we have "color theme" tags. So here's a summary of what I now know of the general color tags:

Generic/related

• restricted_palette
• monochrome
• sepia
• greyscale
• spot_color
• cold_colors
• warm_colors
• color_swatch
• chiaroscuro (see also backlit)

X_and_X

• White
• black_and_white
• black_and_white_and_red
• blue_and_white
• red_and_white
• brown_and_white
• green_and_white
• pink_and_white
• orange_and_white
• yellow_and_white
• Black
• black_and_red
• black_and_blue
• black_and_grey (!?)

Themes (with extras not listed on the wiki page)

• dark_theme

• black_theme
• grey_theme (!)
• blue_theme
• teal_theme
• cyan_theme
• brown_theme
• beige_theme
• tan_theme
• hazel_theme (?!)
• green_theme
• green_and_white_theme
• grey_theme
• orange_theme
• pink_theme
• purple_theme
• red_theme
• white_theme
• green_and_white_theme
• yellow_theme
• gold_theme
• jaws_theme

Clearly there is significant redundancy (e.g. black_and_grey = greyscale) and almost no implications at all. Not to mention that what the "theme" tags are supposed to be is vague to me at best.

I don't care enough to bother with clogging the forum with a bunch of alias/implications proposals, but it seems that some sort of cleanup or at least a good discussion would be a good idea.

The <color>_theme tags are for posts that are drawn with limited palette. For instance, green_theme is for posts that have a clear focus on various shades of green.

As for the <color>_and_<color>, those are for dualtone. Red_and_white = red line-art on white background (or vice versa in some rare cases), etc. So not quite the same as red_theme.

Example:

post #821798 red_and_white
post #542466 red_theme

By the way, there's also warm_colors and cool_colors. The former contains most of red_theme/yellow_theme and the latter most of blue_theme/purple_theme, so there's some major overlap.

Genjar said:
By the way, there's also warm_colors and cool_colors. The former contains most of red_theme/yellow_theme and the latter most of blue_theme/purple_theme, so there's some major overlap.

Gonna add them to the list. I'm sure there's more of these ><

Added this forum to the same wiki article (so meta)

I omitted some of the lesser-used tags to be on the safe side (cyan_theme etc.), in case there was a more populated option, should all possible colour tags in use be included if that's not the case?

There's been attempts to consolidate these and similar types of tags. Can't remember specifics though

Let's see... Looking at the major tags, here's the first three problems I spotted:

- green_and_white_theme. ...why does this exist? It's a mix of posts that should be under either green_and_white or green_theme. Is this some kind of experiment to see if we could combine (alias) the two into a single tag?

- dark_theme and black_theme. These are very similar. Alias black_theme into dark_theme?

- grey_theme and greyscale. Redundant. Most posts would fit under greyscale (some need to have spot_color added), and the others are mistagged. For example: post #283750, post #657413 and post #640156 are not grey_theme.

Going through some colour/art tags, so now's probably the best time to respond to these

(i'll try to add some examples)

- green_and_white_theme, green_and_white ?

personally, i like the idea of all the relevant theme tag ending with _theme

• green_and_white a-> green_and_white_theme
• green_and_white_theme i-> green_theme
• green_and_white_theme i-> white_theme?

- dark_theme and black_theme

not really sure about this one, could go either way.
black is consistent with the 'color' naming, but dark is more accurate

-
Speaking of, 'dark' and 'black' refer to two related, but different things

• dark: brightness value etc. not explicitly related to hue
• black: no hue, no color

An image can have a dark theme, if the brightness/gamma is low
but it wouldn't necessarily be a black theme, if the color black isn't predominant

For a good example of this, compare 'white theme' with 'light' theme on posts like green_and_white

• green_and_white_theme could imply green_theme
• and maybe white_theme

even though most (but not all) examples of the combined tags are light themed.

That said, darker white colors, and lighter dark colors, are grey.
And we have a grey_theme/greyscale tag already, so idk

all that said though, if people are mixing up dark and black theme, then it's probably best to alias them anyway and use something else for the other term

-
on a related note, just created light_theme, which is similar to the warm_colors tag, but not all 'warm' colours have to be light/high gamma/intensity/chroma etc.

-

There's also the muted_colors tag, for posts with low saturation (not necessarily color value, brightness/gamma

ok apparently that tag doesn't exist.
neither does pale colors or muted palette

- grey_theme and greyscale.

yeah was wondering about that too. for the time being, i'd be inclined to say that aliasing them would simplify things until the site can sort them more efficiently (see the dark/black theme above for more)

titanmelon said:

all that said though, if people are mixing up dark and black theme, then it's probably best to alias them anyway

That was done weeks ago.

Can this be the 'official' color tags wiki thing?

-
The wiki for cream mentions beige, which is invalidated

should that be beige_theme? Or something else?

The color itself isn't exactly 'pure brown', yellow, white etc.

--

@Genjar: Oh, didn't notice. That's probably for the best for now

titanmelon said:
Can this be the 'official' color tags wiki thing?

Only valid ones should be added.
Just because something exists, doesn't mean that it should be listed on the wiki: in many cases, ones with low count are invalid tags that we haven't just haven't had time to sort out yet.

Listing such tags in the wiki encourages using them. Which should be avoided.

Genjar said:
Only valid ones should be added.
Just because something exists, doesn't mean that it should be listed on the wiki: in many cases, ones with low count are invalid tags that we haven't just haven't had time to sort out yet.

Listing such tags in the wiki encourages using them. Which should be avoided.

Well, I meant this being the place for official color tagging forum discussion etc. (was going to make a new one but remembered this existed),

But that's a valid point, agreed (not sure if it's already happened with some of the low count ones I added to tag group:colors

Should I include a more explicit warning about those low-count ones along the lines of:

'tags being listed on [wiki article] do not necessarily mean they're official'?

-
Not listing the low-count ones somewhere tends to have them be lost until someone brings it up again (via tagging projects, aliases/implications etc.) though

What then?

Made a somewhat related feature request about this here: forum #189783

For having a label/way to identify 'official' tags and wiki articles

Perhaps 'peer-reviewed' is a more accurate way of putting it, but I really dislike the sound of that for some reason

titanmelon said:
'tags being listed on [wiki article] do not necessarily mean they're official'?

If it's in the wiki, it's considered official. That's the wiki is for: guide for how to properly tag things. Adding in tags that shouldn't be used seriously devaluates its usefulness.

Not listing the low-count ones somewhere tends to have them be lost until someone brings it up again (via tagging projects, aliases/implications etc.) though

Maybe you could list them in your profile, or something like that. But there's no real chance of anything actually getting lost: all invalid tags stay on the master tag list until someone gets around to doing something about them. It's not a matter of finding them, it's a matter of finding time for it.

If you come across invalid colors and such, the best thing is to either submit an alias for invalidation or to manually clean it out (if the tag count is low).

Genjar said:
If it's in the wiki, it's considered official.

Eh...semi-official, and prone to changing.

Really it depends on who writes it and how long ago that was. :/

Genjar said:
If you come across invalid <tags>, the best thing is to either submit an alias for invalidation or to manually clean it out (if the tag count is low).

^

parasprite said:
Eh...semi-official, and prone to changing.

Certainly, some of the older ones are out of date.
Though that's not a sufficient reason to start listing tags that are clearly invalid. The outdated ones should be fixed, instead.

titanmelon said:
on a related note, just created light_theme, which is similar to the warm_colors tag, but not all 'warm' colours have to be light/high gamma/intensity/chroma etc.

Redundant with white_theme, should be aliased. Possibly even white_theme -> light_theme despite the tag count, since that'd be consistent with the dark_theme alias.

So many colour tags! - We mars well have a rainbow one too!

re: the *theme versus X_and_X, I gather that the former were created so that there are two distinct set in restricted_palette, but only one of those set is implicated to monochrome. If that is the case, then no we can't start making them all in *theme

Genjar said:
Redundant with white_theme, should be aliased. Possibly even white_theme -> light_theme despite the tag count, since that'd be consistent with the dark_theme alias.

Hm, can't really find a reason why not, at least until the tag becomes too big anyway
-

Relatedly, there are a pair of very low (<5) count tags:

• bright_colors (4)
• dark_colors (1)

Should anything be done with them?

This is related to what I was saying somewhere about the differences between chroma, 'brightness', and hue

But there's the question of how reliably can we count on the majority of taggers to be aware of the difference, and not use the above tags interchangeably with other ones (??)

They could make nice umbrella tags though, since not all examples of warm_colors or cool_colors have a high brightness value

Same for all the *_themes

I would like to suggest the same thing I said on a survey a year or two ago. And that is the ability to create and search-by-range, tags which hold RGB and/or HSV information. Thus you could have tags like rgbeyes:ac17d5, or hsvtheme:220-40-40..260-100-100. And a color picker would make it easier to add and find such tags.

That could work as a solution to all the *_themes, *_hairs, *_eyess, *_furs, etc.

Hm, should the common color tags be disambiguated instead of pseudo-invalidated?
The former seems to be more useful than the latter, since you can still use the base tag:

• red_(disambiguation)
• red_theme
• red_body
• red_fur
• red_skin
• [...]
• red_background
• [...]

etc. i.e,

red a-> red_(disambiguation)

instead of red -> invalid_color

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See also p.forum #200358, p.forum #200372

SaimonPSmith said:

This sounds really interesting (..if it doesn't already exist somewhere on the site)

Colo(u)r standardization

There's some talk about cyan, teal, and blue in forum #181297
-
I was/am writing up a colour unification forum post for the site which aims to standardize all the color tags we use for all the different things..

But it may be a while until that's finished
In the meantime, anyone who's interested could have a look at the draft version

Of particular note are the following links:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_color_term#Basic_color_terms
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color

titanmelon said:

Colo(u)r standardization

There's some talk about cyan, teal, and blue in forum #181297
-
I was/am writing up a colour unification forum post for the site which aims to standardize all the color tags we use for all the different things..

But it may be a while until that's finished
In the meantime, anyone who's interested could have a look at the draft version

Of particular note are the following links:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_color_term#Basic_color_terms
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color

concerning your draft and a not so small problem of using a pure scientific(rainbow based) system is that it would exclude one of the most used recognizable colors in pretty much all art and nature it self, brown. And i do think it is worthwhile still having established secondaries like tan(common human skin) or cyan(major color system primary) among others thru il agree if others dont think secondaries/outlyers arnt worthwhile.

Is there a tag for overly saturated colors? You know, the sparkledog ones.