color picker

is the color picker going to be an option or that is the only one we can use?

the Mac OS X color picker is really allot better, and i would prefer to continue using it. it has sliders for RGB, CMYK, HSB, grayscale, a color-wheel, color swatches, and the ability to keep a swatch of color so you can select it with a click instead of remembering the RGB values. it also is open to plugins that give you even more control and choices over your colors. i dont know what it looks like on the PC, but the one in SL feels very limiting, and i would much rather the increased options that i have now using the standard mac color picker.

although the new texture picker is amazing, gonna have to start sorting all my textures now




jester




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thanks for the fast reply kelly,

would it be possible to make it an option to use an OS specific one? that way we get the best of both worlds, the additional flexibility of the OS specific one, but a standard one that everyone has access to.

i didnt realize that i cold save swatches in the SL one, but that wont let me carry swatches over to other apps. and saving swatches means losing the default color palette, making it harder to get basic colors that are the same every time, i.e. pink there is a wide band of the color pink, and its not simply maxing out red and no blue or green, you need to have G and B almost full to get pink. without a set of swatches that are default as common colors ill end up using the mac os color picker to make most of my colors anyway and just end up adding another step in making anything.

although its more the loss of options of how to select a color that bugs me, i frequently use CMYK to set a color, or a combination of all the choices that there are to arrive at the perfect color, pick a crayon, adjust the cyan, the green, desaturate it, add some red, etc.

i also use all the tools i have at my disposal, if i want to match a color of something i cant edit, i.e. doing a custom build for someone that wants an item to match something they bought. i use the built in digital color meter to see what color something on my screen is, so i can set my RGB values to match.

i really like the building tools changes, and the texture picker. they make SL much better for building and texturing. but the new color picker feels like a big step back.



jester

This should have been more obvious to me but I missed it the first time around! Eeeps. Thanks, and now I know.

As an extension: what about more swatches or configurable palettes for different jobs and such? 32 swatches on the bottom doesn't seem a lot, especially when the presets will be overwritten for new colors.

Also, pardon if I'm missing something, but how come having "Apply Immediately" checked with the Color Picker open doesn't seem to preview correctly on the active selection, but this behavior does work with Pick Texture?

Hmmmmmm. Thanks.

i saw that too torley, i think its cause the saturation slider on the right is all the way up, move it down and it works right updating the colors as you select them.




jester



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Thankyou jester. Appears to be buggy behavior to me because even if you select deeply-saturated swatches, it won't update correctly.

Oh please tell me I wont have to use RGB to pick colors in the next version of SL!

Please please please please provide HSV. I just can't think in RGB. If it's true this will be only RGB I just won't be able to do any building anymore!

i can't get into preview right now. can somebody please tell me if the user presets get reset every time you relog like they do with the windows picker?

They appear to save fine to me. Which brings to mind another question: are these user presets saved serverside like textures, or is it a clientside thing like the general Preference settings?

Okay i had a chance to try it (nearly had a heart attack there!) It's not as bad as I feared (only RGB sliders) but does feel like a step back from what I had... At least I can still make stuff with it! My (hopefully) constructive criticism:

1) Please allow sliders for HSV instead of the color square and slider. A lot of times I want to just nudge one without having to worry about squiggling in the other direction like the box does. I'd be happy to hide the box or make it teeny tiny like Illustrator or Flash have.

2) Please allow the HSL and RGB number to have little arrows to click on if you cant do sliders.

3). Please cut each of the saved swatches into half or four pieces. They really don't need to be that big!

4) Please add a magnifying glass so I can pick out colors from anywhere on the screen (I dunno if windows folks had this or not but I use it all the time).

5) Please layout your editing windows with less "white space". I like white space when reading, but for editing tools I want them as small as possible so I can see what I'm doing. Photoshop and Illustrator are really good at doing a color picker and texture picker like thing without using up as much space.

Oh, and some feedback for the texture picker:

1) Please allow a way to resize the list not just the texture preview


Loving it otherwise!

Those are great suggestions which will go a long way towards improving the efficiency and ease of coloring the world, Aes.

I also suggest the following little aesthetic enhancement:

-dragging the main current colorbox onto a swatch should highlight that swatch upon mouseover, as a visual cue to show it will be replaced upon releasing the mouse button.

Would also be cool to be able to hold a key like Shift while clicking on several swatches or even in the spectrum to create a resulting color that was a blend of the previously selected. (And yes, this behavior is like the crayon picker on the Mac.)

Since SL is now using it's own colour picker perhaps aswell as the current RGB (0-255) values the window could have the colour vector (as used in scripts) in this window also. This would make it alot easier for converting colours in 0-255 format to 0-1 format used in scripts. For example:
Red: 255
Green: 255
Blue: 0
<1,1,0> could appear at the bottom of the colour picker window. If it was selectable as a whole vector that would be cool too .

that's a great idea! ANYTHING to make working with vectors easier please.

Showing the vector would just about make up for losing the Mac color picker... as long as there's a "magnifying glass" or "eyedropper" function to match colors with objects in the environment.

BTW, an extra complication with the latter feature is that usually we're trying to match the base color, not the current rendering with lighting effects. That should actually be easier based on the server-side data, but might be harder from the client side.

So an LL-implemented color-matcher might work better than the native Mac one.

neko

for that kind of function i would like to recommend the digital color meter thats in your utilities folder in the applications folder. it has an adjustable aperture size, can measure RGB as 8 bit values (0-255), percentage (easily used to get the 0-1 value), and many others that are less useful to SL.

and if the light is wrong in SL you can position the sun exactly where you want it by going into mouselook and hitting alt-m then look where you want the sun and hit alt-m again.



jester



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Thanks for the tip. But is the effect with full sun the color you would need for the object?

I'm not saying I know it isn't, I'm just wondering. Because I can imagine it might not be. I don't know how much sun you'd want to make sure you were getting the same color. (Guess I should experiment a bit.)

neko

heh sounds like yall want to paint the town red


...bad pun alert