thirdavedesign's 3d histogram project is released.

3dhistogram.com is an open-source web application for producing and modeling a three-dimensional color histogram from a supplied image. this tool was developed to help people visualize, understand, and make better use of color in their endeavors whatever they might be.

to try it, go to http://3dhistogram.com, click 'analyze', and then upload an image. (the image will be stored on our server for a short time, and may be accessible to others.) after the image is uploaded, our server will enumerate the colors included in the image, and return this data to your computer. the colors present in the image are rendered in a 3d space according to their rgb color value and their relative frequency in the image.

red, green, and blue (rgb) are the three primary colors that televisions and computer monitors use to produce color. from the black of a blank screen, the three colors are mixed additively -- the full combination of all three yields white. typical computer monitors allocate 8 bits to each color's channel, accommodating 256 possible shades of each primary color, and over 16.7 million possible combinations in the color space.

histograms show the number of times that different things happens. a color histogram graphs the number of pixels found in an image with a given color. the 3d histogram on this site provides a visualization of the overall color composition of an image, representing a small range of colors with a cube. the cube is positioned in a 3d space according to the base color's red, green, and blue values. the cube is painted with the base color, and is sized relative to the frequency of that color in the image.

the 3d histogram web application is built with a flash-based web interface and a php-based server-side processor. the 3d-rendering is built with the open-source papervision3d library, and the image processing uses the open-source gd library. we are very grateful to these projects' maintainers and contributors.

we really like free and open source software and the exchanges that it encourages. we extend the use of our code and concepts under the general public license. if you would like to contribute to this project's improvement, please join our discussion group.