Breeding: For Color

Krista · 2023-03-29T13:23:18+00:00

Teddahlia (starting a new discussion for this) Thank you for answering all of my questions about Giraffe. Are there other dahlias that have the same lateral...

Bessie

Teddahlia that deep purple Dahlia color is spectacular!
How to come up with one color for the Dahlia? Humm, that might take some trial and error. I really like your idea of blurring the image. I actually did blur images using an open source image processing library and Python in 2008. We turned the images into color histograms, and then tried to identify the blurred image (document) based on the histogram similarities.

As with many software solutions, one solution may not fit every "use case". Bi-color Dahlias and peony Dahlia with prominent yellow centers come to mind as special cases. If you think it's worthwhile, should we start a new thread and talk about what the software "use cases" would be? More than one person could answer the question "What would you want the Dahlia color app to do?" "What would you use it for?", etc. A simple solution is always better.

Teddahlia

I suggested one procedure that would help the trial garden directors assign color to the seedlings. Currently judges use the pathetic ADS color chart to indicate the color(s). The director may get a half dozen different colors for the same flower and has to report one. My suggestion is to use a digital camera or cell phone and take a picture or three of the entry and include a grey card in the picture. It is used to correct color and after correction the color would be an accurate version of the flowers colors.
"grey card is a cheap and easy-to-use tool designed to help photographers adjust their exposure and white balance settings by providing a reference point. This reference point will set a white balance or color balance point for a particular image set and all images captured afterward. A grey card is 18% grey."

Bessie

Teddahlia I think your idea could be refined and standardized to to be useful. There are a few points of challenge to succeed uniform, repeatable results by varying individuals. If the challenges of different image capture mechanisms and different color adjustment software can be achieved to get repeatable results, your idea sounds viable. Are there other hurdles that would need to be overcome?

Teddahlia

Obviously, a volunteer with some skills would be needed to collect the pictures and assign the colors.

MissyWeitzel

Would something like this work?
Nixsensor.com

Bessie

MissyWeitzel that looks like it would work!
https://www.nixsensor.com/nix-for-graphic-design/
Cost may be an issue. I didn't dig that far.

Teddahlia

Back to breeding. What solid color is the hardest to breed?

Krista

Teddahlia Purple?

SteveM

Teddahlia For me the hardest color to breed is dark-purple-black .

Emilyp

White?

Krista

Emilyp I think you’re right!

Teddahlia

Here are some colors without difficulty ratings:
Light Pink, Dark Pink, Tan or solid peach, white, red, dark red, light red but not pink, purple, orange, yellow, lavender, gold, blue lavender, maroon purple, blue purple, cream yellow, saturated yellow.
I am sure I am missing some colors or you would want re-name some of them.
When we have all the solid colors listed , I will comment on some of them.

No blush white flower.

Krista

Teddahlia I had to rearrange your list into rainbow color-order to try to identify missing solid colors, because that’s the way my brain works. These are what I came up with for possible missing colors but I’m really reaching: true pink, bright neon yellow (this can’t truly be hard to breed for), brown, true cream. I think I’m off base. 😆

AndreaB

Your favorite color isn’t on your list… bronze!
My guess is pure white.

Teddahlia

Bronze is on my shi* list and I prefer to use tan or peach or shades of orange. Pink maybe should be in three versions light pink, pink and bright(dark) pink. White should be in two versions" pure white and white with slight blush. Brown dahlias have not yet been bred and they go with the green ones and blue ones.

Krista

Well I’m stumped. All the colors I can imagine are on your list of colors without difficulty ratings. What are we missing? 😆

Teddahlia

Mauve and puce. Joking. I will start commenting tomorrow.

Krista

Teddahlia I’m hoping this discussion also ends up revealing when we start breeding for color. My under-par memory is needling the idea that we breed for form first, and color follows.

Teddahlia

Margaret would shoot me if I said to breed for form first before color. Form fanatics consider yellow to be one of the perfect colors for show flowers. They have obscure reasoning and say solid yellow is very evenly distributed on the florets without streaks or imperfections. To them a medium to light yellow is one of the perfect colors for dahlias. And I think most of us would rather have a more exciting color than yellow . I will forgo the chemical explanation of yellow dahlias and suffice to say it is not very exciting either.

Krista

Teddahlia Oh. I can’t wait for more. 😃!!!

drewtheflorist

Teddahlia I think show people like yellow because it exhibits well under artificial light (which has been primarily fluorescent --but is being overtaken by LED ). We'll see how that transpires down the road .

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