Hello zachm,

My final goal is to detect the colored ball (magenta with green & yellow) in a picture. to do this I got 30 pictures to get the data from and test on.

these are the 2 less complex. the pictures are taken from a variaty of distance, lighting conditions etc. and the ball is in a variety of backgrounds- bushes, desk, chairs, wastebin etc. etc.

my approach is to focus on the colorful area which interests me, then do an edge detection, hough etc. I need to detect JUST the colored ball- i.e. that it's a ball and the one I want.
since giving it a range of colors gives me a wide detection I want to focus on an area where there's a large variety of colors- regardless of which they are.
I tried the block process with an IF command (just for magenta and yellow) and couldn't really get it to work (something I wrote wrong I guess).

I am not interested in counting the no. of colors in an image, because the whole idea was to be able to "zoom" on an area in the image through the fact that it contains more colors than other sections of the image.

hope I explained it better now.....