Abstract: A color palette mapped to an image obtained by any known process is decomposed to separate contrast components from hue/saturation pairs, then only the hue/saturation pairs are remapped to a new set of hue/saturation parameters according to available mapping techniques, including remapping of ordered color sets, into a new ordered set wherein at least a portion of the contrast components are held at fixed values and not altered. By fixing the contrast components, color remapping is constrained to certain symmetric transformations in Munsell color space which preserves features of the source image in the resultant image.

Abstract: Colors for a two-dimensional ordered image such as a fractal map are selected by first sampling colors from a real or natural source of colors, such as a tree or a feather and storing values representing the colors in Munsell color space (the three-dimensional space defined by hue, saturation and value) in a source color file, then ordering colors by distance in Munsell color space from a seed reference color (e.g. black), thereafter storing a representation of the color whose distance is closest to the seed reference color as the first color in a storage file known as an ordered color file, using the first color as a new reference color, then sorting the remaining colors according to distance from the new reference color, and storing a representation of the color closest to the new reference color as the second color in the ordered color file. The process is recursively performed until all colors in the source color file have been ordered in the ordered color file.