How I Built a Perceptual Color Quantization Engine for LEGO Mosaics

The Problem Converting a photo into a LEGO mosaic sounds simple: resize the image, find the closest LEGO color for each pixel, done. Except it looks terrible. Skin tones turn green. Hair becomes a muddy blob. The algorithm picks colors that are mathematically close in RGB but perceptually wrong. The Solution: OKLab Color Space I switched from RGB to OKLab , a perceptually uniform color space designed in 2020. In OKLab, equal numerical distances correspond to equal perceived color differences. Th