Very often sand collectors have difficulties in describing the sand colors. While descriptions like “greenish beige” or “reddish yellow” can give a vague image on the original color, they can also misslead due to the subjectivity of the author, lingvistic skills, lightning conditions and many others. What was always missing is a standardized classification of sand colors using either custom made color tabs or some already existing international systems.

Color gradient chart made of real scans of sand samples

Several attempts have been made to describing sand colors by using hexadecimal color codes, similar to those used in internet for websites design (e.g. #FFFFFF for white, #FF0000 for red etc). The method is not really suitable for sand because sand does usually contains patches of more colors according to its mineralogical composition. However, selecting “most representative” colors (instead of just one) and listing their hexadecimal codes could be one step forward in finding best way to describe the colors of your sand collection.

There are several internet websites who can provide free photo analysis. Among them I like most www.colorsuckr.com which is providing detailed list of 12 most common colors found in one particular image. You can enter the full URL of the image and the website is returning something like this:

Left image: 0312 KE-RV Kenya, Rift Valley, Samburu National Reserve
Right image: 0264 PH-MM Philippines, Metropolitan Manila, Luzon island, Manila

I personally find that 12 colors is too much to describe a sand sample. 3 or 4 would be than enough, eventually including a percentage of how much of the respective color can be found in the image. Nevertheless, the website is very handy to use when it comes to quick extracting most common colors and for the Firefox users there is available a simple add-on to make getting image colors even easier than ever. Just install the ColorSuckr Add-on for your Firefox browser, then simply right click any image on a webpage and choose ‘Extract Image Colors’ from the menu to go stright to the ColorSuckr website with the analysed image.

For web developpers, here’s a link to a PHP class that reverses the most used color tones from one image (it can open an image in the following formats: JPEG, GIF or PNG): Color extract PHP class.