Using Python to resize and get HEX color values from images

Python is by far one of the easiest programming languages to use. Writing functions are intuitive and so is reading the code itself. When dealing with images I found Python to be easier to use compared to NodeJS and PHP.

Use Case

Let’s say you were building a website that’s similar to Unsplash. Users are uploading 10MB images to your website from their DLSR camera. Displaying these images on the front-end is asking for a terrible page load. So how do you resize images with Python?

1. Locate your image
2. Open as an Image
3. Resize Save
4. Dependencies

• webcolor: https://pypi.org/project/webcolors/
• python-resize-image: https://pypi.org/project/python-resize-image/
• colorthief https://github.com/fengsp/color-thief-py

Install Dependencies

pip3 install webcolors python-resize-image colorthief

Resize Image

from resizeimage import resizeimage 
from PIL import Image
image_path = './dog.jpeg'
new_max_width = 1800
new_filename = './dog-1800.jpeg'
with open(image_path, 'r+b') as f:
  with Image.open(f) as image:
  # Resize
  smaller_image = resizeimage.resize_width(image, new_max_width)
  smaller_image.save(new_filename, image.format)

Your image needs to be open as bytes and readable. image.format re-saves the image as the correct type (dog.jpeg is saved back as a jpeg). If you run the code above you just resized an image. The height is auto-calculated based on width keeping the ratio. The PIL package stands for “Pillow” and is installed with “python-resize-image”. Pillow is the ultimate package for dealing with an image. A quick way to get the current height and width plus other metadata.

With the same open(image_path, ‘r+b’) using ColorThief a palette of colors are found.

Get the HEX color value from image

from resizeimage import resizeimage
from PIL import Image
import webcolors
from colorthief import ColorThief
image_path = './dog.jpeg'
new_max_width = 1800
new_filename = './dog-1800.jpeg'
image_colors = []
with open(image_path, 'r+b') as f:
  with Image.open(f) as image:
        # Resize
        smaller_image = resizeimage.resize_width(image, max_width)
        smaller_image.save(new_image_path, image.format)
        # Get Colors
        color_thief = ColorThief(new_image_path)
        color_palette = color_thief.get_palette(color_count=10, quality=10)
        for color in color_palette:
            print(webcolors.rgb_to_hex(color))

color_palette = returns an array tuples of RGB values then, webcolors.rgb_to_hex converts each tuple in to a hex value.

Examples

>>> import webcolors
>>> webcolors.rgb_to_hex((255, 255, 255))
u'#ffffff'

Get color by name

>>> import webcolors
>>> webcolors.rgb_to_name((255, 255, 255))
u'white'

Sample Code — https://github.com/terrillo/learn-python
YouTube video — https://youtu.be/modMAADs71w