Usability and Colors

FG/BG Dialog Color [GIMP, Wheel and Scales tabs]

History Colours and Small Improvements [Modifying some scopes]

In the current 2.9 Git Master all two rows are destined to history of colours used by the user during the sessions.
The behaviour is described here.
Bug Report 772883 > Color History - adding new scope.

Dialogs where the history colours was implemented.

History and Palette - Improvement Reasons

To graphic design, painting, certain swatches must be of a kind fixed as swatches on canvas (ready as colour tube or reference colour of a layout page). Each work has a fixed number of these swatches... and other are random or temporary. For an artist or a designer, e.g., the fixed swatches are placed on the bottom row. The mixed swatches, the variations (all pick colours) of the first row swatches are placed in the first row.

Comments

Elle Stone

Well, the first thing I do when I want to paint is pick some colors to paint with.

The way things are now, every time I pick and then paint with a new color, the swatches and also the palette tab colors update and rearrange themselves, so I have to keep looking for where the color I want next has moved to. And sometimes the colors are not easy to tell apart just by looking at the swatches, partly because the swatches are small (and need to be small) and partly because GIMP color picker/foreground tool isn't color-managed (and really needs to be).

So that's why I make a layer and paint color swatches for the colors I want to use. But this also is awkward. Having a fixed palette of swatches on the pick foreground tab would be very, very convenient.

Having the top row of swatches update the bottom row be fixed (even after closing GIMP) unless/until deliberately changed would seem to be ideal, but of course would need testing to be sure.

Improvements Schema

Is very useful to divide the two rows with different scopes (Elle Stone Suggestion):

• Top row is set once and remains until is not deliberately modified/reset;
• Bottom row changes as new colours are picked.

Explaining the improvements on the dialogs.

FG Invert Color

Concept

In the painting tasks, are very important to work with different methods to select or to choose colors. The complementary colors is commonly utilized by all artists.

Improvements reasons

To invert a colour is necessary many steps between pick and wheel colors dialogs. With a shortcut these actions are more immediate and, the painting session has less actions and steps with different color dialogs.

Invert color of FG

Add a toggle shortcut to invert the current colour on FG.

References

A modern approach to complementaries colors

Independent Tabs of Colour Dialogs

Implement the possibility to have as independent tab. The current version have the internal tabs of the picker colours GIMP, Wheel and Palette.

Current Colour Dialogs

The different pickers are as tab on the Change Foreground Color Dialog or as button to select each picker as is on the FG/BG Colour Dialog.

The two dialogs of Colour with picker tabs and colour controls [GIMP, Print, Watercolor, Wheel, Palette, Scales]

Implementation Reasons

The more complete dialog is the Change Foreground Colour Dialog, but is very invasive on canvas. To have the main picker colours as independent tab is possible to think in the docks where we have two or three views of colour instances. For instance, GIMP picker + Scales or Wheel + Scales.

Implementation Schema

Transform the internal tabs of GIMP, Wheel, Palette and Scales in the independent tabs.

Independent Colour Picker Tabs

Note: Is possible that the history colours not is usable in all tabs. Perhaps useful only the traditional picker colours as GIMP and Wheel.

Dockable Picker Colours Example

Each tab, in this way, can be dockable, for example, Palette + Scales: