Usability and Colors

FG Invert Color

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 color 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 color on FG.

References

A modern approach to complementary colors

Color Swapping

Main Scope is to have a swap a "fixed number" of colours used in each session, via a toggle shortcut key.

Current possibilities

Swap FG/BG Shortcut

Swap between FG/BG Color via keyboard shortcut → screenshot Configure Keyboard Shortcuts.

Configuring the current keyboard shortcut to swap the FG/BG colours.

Scrolling Swatches Current Palette

Scrolling between the swatches of the current palette via Keyboard Shortcuts:
The 'context-foreground-palette-...' and 'context-background-palette-...' to scroll the all swatches of a palette.
But to use these shortcuts is necessary to have the Palette Swatches and the Palette Editor opened or dockable.
For more details see the report on Bugzilla about these shortcuts → Context actions on Palette dialogues.

Comments [Massimo Valentini]

I experimented a bit with these actions and I have found that they only work if the 'Palette Editor' is docked or at least open. So one has to open Windows->Dockable Dialogs->Palettes and double click on a palette, this way the 'Palette Editor' is opened and after that, these shortcuts start working. They keep working even if the dockable is not the active tab.

Configuring the current keyboard shortcut scrolling the swatches in a palette (thanks to Massimo Valentini).

Swatches Colours Stored

The Swatches of colours used and or stored by the user appear on two different dialogues: FG/BG Color(Dockable) and Change Foreground/Background Colour (a floating dialogue that is shown when clicking on FG/BG on Toolbox. The swatches (two rows) could be understood as a palette built, on on-the-fly on the Change Foreground/Background Colour dialogue, during the work sessions by the user in three ways:

• via the button '>' to add the current colour on FG to the palette or;
• via drag and drop colour in each swatch or;

• via picker colour, but is added only after the colour is used on canvas. Each new colour is placed, always, in the first slot (left side of the first row), and the displacement of colours happening versus the right-side direction to each new colour that is added.

History Colors in the FG/BG Colours.

Change Foreground Color Dialogs.

New Action to Scrolling the Swatches

Create an action of the history colours independently, or rather, is not necessary to have opened or tabbed the palette editor.

Improvement Reasons

Enhancing the General Usability:

1. To have a fast way to access the history colours used in each work session;
2. To avoid excessive use of steps, via mouse mainly, between paint tools tasks (repetitive stress), see test below;
3. Swapping colour without the necessity to use the traditional dialogues... the session task is more focused and simple.

Scenario | Float full or Dockable | Single Window

Is the same thing, because we need to move the cursor around the window/docks and make clicks to select colours in the different dialogues.

Fill a Mondrian Grid

I imagined a case of colouring multiple areas to have an idea of the amount the clicks and movements along the screen to finish this work.

Example to find the number of steps to pick colours in the current release.

Steps to fill the grid

1. Rectangle Tool Selection → select a rectangle;
2. Bucket fill tool;
3. Choose colour;
4. Click on FG Color on Toolbox → Open Change Foreground Color → Move cursor on Dialog → Choice steps (minimal 1 step, 2 steps if need to close dialogue);
   
   1. Move cursor until FG/BG Color Dialog → Choice steps (2 steps);
      
5. Fill the selected rectangle.

To choose colours is necessary a minimum of 2 steps and a maximum of 3 steps (cursor movements and clicks).

The sample has 6*6=36 rectangles, only to select colours for all rectangles, we must cross or move the cursor and do clicks at an amount of a minimal 72 and a maximum of 108 times.

Swap Colours | Feature Proposal

 +-----------------------+     
 | A | B | C | D | E | F |  
 +-----------------------+ 
   |   |   |
   |   |   +--Next Color (C) --------> (3) Hit key again → is selected this swatch.
   |   |
   |   +----> Next Color (B) --------> (2) Raise finger from key → is selected this swatch, previous of the last colour used.
   |                
   +--------> Last colour used (A) ---> (1) Hit key Shortcut Open Popup with swatches.
        
canvas                           

• History colour pop-up, for instance, with the last 6 colours stored in the history of the FG/BG Colors dialogue. This pop-up is enabled when hit the key shortcut action.
• Each time that raise finger from the key and hit again, the selection colour goes to the next colour, for instance, from A to B, and successively until F and in a closed cycle. The principle is the same as the shortcut to swap colours between FG/BG, but in this case, we have 6 colours.
• Each time that the shortcut is held down, the colour remains stopped in the slot, for example, A.
• The cycle is stopped naturally after a lapse of time between hitting the key and raising the finger of the key.
• Have on GIMP preferences the possibility to choose the number of colours to use in this pop-up, for example, a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 12 colours.

Note: is possible to think the sequence from F going to A, where F is the last colour used by the user, E the previous and successively.

References

A short video showing general behaviour.