---
title: "Fingerprint ⌾"
description: "PD's objective read of every artwork: what the Output literally looks like, measured from its actually rendered pixels — color, light, composition, countable shapes, and the four taste axes."
category: "app"
keywords: ["fingerprint", "taste axes", "geometric", "organic", "colorful", "monochrome", "dense", "sparse", "structured", "chaotic", "palette", "swatches", "reads as"]
last_updated: "2026-07-27"
---

# Fingerprint ⌾

Every Output on PD carries a **Fingerprint**: the platform's objective read of the artwork itself. It doesn't come from metadata, trait lists, or anyone's opinion — the platform looks at the Output's *actually rendered pixels* and measures what is really there. Nothing is declared and nothing is hand-tagged, so any two Fingerprints on the platform can be compared honestly, whoever made the work.

**How:** Open an Artwork ▸ + More ▸ Attributes — the Fingerprint is its own wall of readings.

You'll find it on the Output's character sheet (Artwork ▸ + More ▸ Attributes), as its own wall of readings.

## Reads As

The Fingerprint leads with the sentence a human would say: *"two blue squares and a yellow circle."* The platform finds the distinct regions of color in the render, classifies each countable shape, reads the arrangement — stripes, a field, a scatter — and writes the plain-language description from what it found.

## Color

The dominant color and the accent behind it, the palette size (monochrome through polychrome), measured warmth, the relationship between the Output's two leading colors — and **Swatches**: the Output's actual colors as hex chips, sampled from its own render. Tap one and the hex is copied.

## Light

Brightness, saturation, contrast, and tone — plus the photographic **value key** (high-key, low-key) that neither reading shows alone.

## Composition

Where the visual weight sits (gravity), left–right symmetry, negative space (air), fine grain (texture), and orientation.

## The taste axes

The Fingerprint places every Output on four poles-pairs — the same four axes for every artwork on PD:

| Axis | What it measures |
| --- | --- |
| **Geometric ↔ Organic** | how straight-ruled vs free-flowing the Output's edges run |
| **Colorful ↔ Monochrome** | how much color the Output actually carries |
| **Dense ↔ Sparse** | how full the frame is, and how much is happening in it |
| **Structured ↔ Chaotic** | how ordered the composition reads |

Measured, not opined. These axes are the beginning of taste as data: because every Output gets the same objective read, a collection's holdings can be read the same way — the profile of what a collector actually collects, built from the art itself.

## Against the edition

Readings don't float alone. Where an Output's brightness, contrast, or texture sits against the rest of its edition, the Fingerprint says so — *"34% · top 8%"* — computed from the real stored reads across the set.

## What it powers

The Fingerprint is working all over the platform: color grouping in every gallery, the light / mood / orientation sorts, how the resident characters literally *see* the Output in front of them, and the taste reads that compare art by what it actually is.

## Further reading

- [Outputs](/docs/app/outputs) — the artwork surface the Fingerprint lives on
- [Discovery](/docs/app/discovery) — the sorts and groupings it powers