TECH Signal 572
Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
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A developer created a custom color space and procedural generation algorithm that maps a bounded 3D spherical region to plausible human skin tones, offering an alternative to limited preset palettes or unrestricted RGB pickers.
For engineers building character creators, digital art tools, or any application representing human diversity, this provides a mathematically defined region of plausible skin tones that can be sampled uniformly. It avoids both the exclusion of limited presets and the usability problems of unbounded color pickers where most colors aren't plausible skin tones.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The algorithm defines a custom (t, u, v) color space where a spherical region maps to plausible skin tones, with two sampling methods provided: deterministic uniform sampling and rejection sampling.
Conversion from the custom space to RGB uses a linear transformation with specific coefficients, making it computationally simple to implement in any language.
The author explicitly positions this as 'good enough' rather than authoritative, noting that real skin varies across the body and is affected by blood flow, melanin concentration, and various conditions.
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