Selecting colour

[RobS]

Hi,

PL16 on MacOSX 10.6.2

When I double click the foreground or background colour in the toolbar (for example) I get the colour selection dialogue that allows me to edit the colour. If I roam the mouse out over the image I'm editing then it changes to an eye-dropper and allows me to select colour from within the image. That's all fine.

If I have more than one image open and roam the mouse over any of the images then the mouse remains an eye-dropper, implying that I can pickup colour from any of them, but I can't.

The visual feedback in this case is wrong, implying I can do something that I can't, however the better solution would be to keep the visual feedback as-is, and actually enable that colours could be piked up from anu open PL image. whether or not it is the frontmost one.

Better still would be the ability to pickup colour from anywhere on the screen, irrespective of whether it is a PL image window or not. The apple system-wide colour picker does allow colour selection from anywhere (via the magnifying glass), so if there is a way of invoking that from within PL it would provide one possible solution, albeit limited to the Mac.

More worrying still is the selection of transparency colour in the web export function. Under PNG or GIF settings there is a 'change' button that brings up a new dialogue with three tabs, one of which is transparency. Under the transparency tab is a colour selection box that works like others elsewhere in the UI in that double clicking brings up the colour selection dialogue. With the colour selection dialogue open from here, moving the mouse around other PL windows again changes the pointer to an eye-dropper, with the one difference being that it doesn't work anywhere at all.

Cheers


Rob

[Hoogo]

Looks like a Mac-problem to me, it works fine here on Win.

[RobS]

Hi,

I'm assuming that there is no need to press any modifier key to get eye-dropper colour selection to work across all windows, or from within the web export dialogies.

Without modifier keys then on mac it only works for the topmost image window... and not at all if invoked from within Web export, and perhaps other 'nested' invokation points (not tested). This is repeatable, and very awkward to work with.

Guess it's one for the Huber's, but would be good if someone else with a Mac could confirm the problem... or a workaround.

Cheers


rob

[marco.molteni]

Hi rob,

quite strange, I am using PL16.00 (or 16.10, see my other post) and I can use the eye dropper to pick color from multiple PL image windows without problems.

marco

[bkh]

When I double click the foreground or background colour in the toolbar (for example) I get the colour selection dialogue that allows me to edit the colour. If I roam the mouse out over the image I'm editing then it changes to an eye-dropper and allows me to select colour from within the image. That's all fine.

If I have more than one image open and roam the mouse over any of the images then the mouse remains an eye-dropper, implying that I can pickup colour from any of them, but I can't.

Works for me, too (PL 16.10 on Mac OS 10.6.4). I don't have PL 16.00 any more. There's one point that might be a bit confusing, however. If you click into an inactive window with the colour picker, that window becomes active, and the picked colour goes into the colour well that is currently active in that window. This may be the colour well for the brushes, and you can use it when you switch back to the original window. If the colour well was that of a vector or text object, the picked colour goes into that colour well and not into the colour well you have been using before. Pressing the CMD key while picking the colour keeps the current window in the foreground and changes the current colour well. (Wouldn't that make the better default behaviour?)

Be careful when picking colours from documents with different colour spaces - it seems that the colour picker ignores the colour profiles.

More worrying still is the selection of transparency colour in the web export function. Under PNG or GIF settings there is a 'change' button that brings up a new dialogue with three tabs, one of which is transparency. Under the transparency tab is a colour selection box that works like others elsewhere in the UI in that double clicking brings up the colour selection dialogue. With the colour selection dialogue open from here, moving the mouse around other PL windows again changes the pointer to an eye-dropper, with the one difference being that it doesn't work anywhere at all.

Seems to be a cursor update problem. If the the colour picker was the active tool before using Web Export, PL shows the colour picker cursor while the cursor is above the current window. If the brush was the active tool, it shows the brush cursor. Neither is correct, of course - you can't pick a colour, you can't paint while the dialog is open.

As a workaround for the missing colour picker, you can double click on the colour swatch and use a real colour picker from there.

Cheers

Burkhard.