Welcome to KALMUS's documentation!

KALMUS Color Toolkit

Filmmakers, cinematographers, production designers, and then colorists (the person who fine tunes or grades the color in post production) spend enormous sums and labor deciding a film’s color palette. Why? Because color has an almost subliminal impact on how we perceive a film. Interpreting a film’s use of color, however, remains an elusive and understudied area.

KALMUS is a Python package for the computational analysis of colors in films. It provides quantitative tools to study and compare the use of film color. This package serves two purposes: (1) various ways to measure, calculate and compare a film's colors and (2) various ways to visualize a film's color. We have named the software KALMUS in homage to Natalie Kalmus (1882 - 1965), a Technicolor Director who oversaw the color palettes of nearly 300 Hollywood feature films.

KALMUS utilizes the movie barcode as a visualization of the film's color. It has a modularized pipeline for the generation of barcodes using different measures of color and region of interest in each film frame. KALMUS provides a low-level API, high-level command line, and Graphic user interface for audience from all backgrounds to take advantage of its functionality.

Indices and tables