Color Picker questions

[photoken]

When "Show color beside the Color Picker" is set, the color is displayed as semi-transparent which makes it impossible to judge the color:

color picker.png

1. What is the purpose of doing that?
2. What is the purpose of the "Transparency" value? It is always 100.0

[Herbert123]

Ha! You are absolutely right - the colour itself should NOT be transparent, unless it really *is* transparent. I guess the devs applied an opacity effect to that colour picker mini-dialog, and it also affects the actual colour swatch.

That should definitely be changed - the colour itself should be opaque (or transparent WHEN transparency is actually set for the pixels sampled).

As for the transparency: in Photoline you can actually work with transparency as a additional 8bit channel. This is not really possible in Photoshop (or any other image editor I know of), and initially threw me off a bit. It is, however, extremely useful for certain things. For example, you can open a png image of the web, and often 'hidden' information can then be "painted" into the image with a brush that works on the A channel only. There are other very handy uses for this.

Subtle paint effects can be achieved by varying the opacity only while painting. It's not the same a a layer mask - you are actually painting with opacity only, if you like. Same for gradients, and so on - it is quite different in approach, and, depending on what you are trying to achieve, quite effective and flexible.

Another example: use the brush tool, and change the paint colour - an opacity slider allows you to set the transparency factor. This is not an alpha channel, but real transparency information encoded in the colour. With the colour picker you can check the opacity values. Same for a png image downloaded of the web. It can also be applied to effectively "hide" information in an image.

Also an interesting application of opacity painting: duplicate a layer, apply all sorts of effects, and then hide it by applying zero opacity with the brush set to zero opacity. Then paint the effects back into the image (and change the layer blend mode, if you like) - it feels very similar at that point to Photoshop's history brush. Just a different approach, and no need for a layer mask.

Before I forget: transparency is only available when working with layers - the background will not work with opacity, obviously. You will have to duplicate or convert the background to a layer before you can start painting with transparency.

Btw, talking about colour pickers: have you tried right-mouse clicking on one of the colours in the tool bar yet? If not, try it out, and choose "Harmony" in the pop-up menu.

[photoken]

Btw, talking about colour pickers: have you tried right-mouse clicking on one of the colours in the tool bar yet? If not, try it out, and choose "Harmony" in the pop-up menu.

Oh, yeah. That's a big help for "harmony challenged" guys like me.

That Harmony dialog would be much better if it was non-modal and worked like the Color Select Field Toolbar, so I can select one of the harmonious colours and have it applied to the Brush, then after painting with that colour, simply select one of the other harmonious colours and continue painting. As it is, writing those harmonious colours to the Color List is very cumbersome, especially when I have to then delete those colours from the list to keep the colour list from getting too large.