farver

The goal of farver is to provide very fast, vectorised conversion of colours between different colour spaces, as well as provide fast colour comparisons (distance between colours). To this end it provides an interface to a modified version of the ColorSpace C++ library developed by Berendea Nicolae.

Installation

farver can be installed from CRAN using install.packages('farver'). The development version can be installed from Github using devtools:

# install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('thomasp85/farver')

Use

The main functions of the package areconvert_colour() with an interface very much alike grDevices::convertColor(), and compare_colour() which allows you to calculate the distance between colours using different metrics

Conversion

library(farver)

spectrum <- t(col2rgb(rainbow(10)))
spectrum
#>       red green blue
#>  [1,] 255     0    0
#>  [2,] 255   153    0
#>  [3,] 204   255    0
#>  [4,]  51   255    0
#>  [5,]   0   255  102
#>  [6,]   0   255  255
#>  [7,]   0   102  255
#>  [8,]  51     0  255
#>  [9,] 204     0  255
#> [10,] 255     0  153

convert_colour(spectrum, 'rgb', 'lab')
#>              l         a          b
#>  [1,] 53.24079  80.09796   67.20432
#>  [2,] 72.26072  30.17136   77.22610
#>  [3,] 93.60533 -41.93879   90.27635
#>  [4,] 88.07403 -83.10282   83.59544
#>  [5,] 88.19634 -80.27407   57.92961
#>  [6,] 91.11322 -48.08151  -14.12690
#>  [7,] 47.90478  35.20130  -82.00196
#>  [8,] 33.81896  79.70472 -105.27489
#>  [9,] 51.90416  91.00028  -74.83009
#> [10,] 55.65103  86.53436   -9.71618

Comparison

spectrum2 <- t(col2rgb(heat.colors(10)))

compare_colour(spectrum, spectrum2, 'rgb', method = 'cie2000')[1:6, 1:6]
#>          [,1]     [,2]      [,3]     [,4]     [,5]     [,6]
#> [1,]  0.00000  1.95065  7.130898 15.53837 27.08237 39.88958
#> [2,] 29.50083 27.56585 22.402612 13.98117  2.41602 10.31341
#> [3,] 72.33606 70.32974 64.926436 55.98592 43.59987 30.24747
#> [4,] 85.84698 83.68842 77.854648 68.19997 55.06314 41.59064
#> [5,] 85.92110 83.79762 78.073545 68.67184 56.07682 43.42965
#> [6,] 70.95853 69.55274 65.907013 60.35739 53.72218 47.94387

Supported colour spaces

farver currently supports the following colour spaces:

• CMY
• CMYK
• HSL
• HSB
• HSV
• CIE L*AB
• Hunter LAB
• LCH
• LUV
• RGB
• XYZ
• YXY

Supported distance measures

farver supports the following colour distance metrics

• Euclidean
• CIE1976
• CIE94
• CIE2000
• CMC

White References

farver allows you to set the white point for relative colour spaces, either based on a standard illuminant (A-F series supported) or by specifying chromaticity coordinates or tristimulus values directly

Benchmark

farver is substantially faster than its grDevices counterpart as all operation happens in compiled code:

library(ggplot2)
test <- matrix(runif(30000, min = 0, max = 255), ncol = 3)
timing <- bench::mark(
  farver = convert_colour(test, 'rgb', 'lab'),
  grDevices = convertColor(test, 'sRGB', 'Lab', scale.in = 255), 
  check = FALSE,
  iterations = 100,
  filter_gc = FALSE
)
autoplot(timing)