Enhancements and fixes for the Color Picker/Position tools

[SJ9000]

Hi Hubers,

Since you're hard at work on the next release I thought it would a good time to make some suggestions.

The Color Picker Tool

I'm curious about the design of the color picker tool cursor display. Is there some benefit to the display being transparent? I find it very distracting. Sometimes when the display is on top of a high detail area it's impossible to read. Rather than seeing an accurate color, it's overlaid in front of whatever is under the color rectangle. At the very least the rectangle should be displayed in normal mode, with no background showing through. But to be honest, I'd rather the whole info readout not be transparent. And there seems to be a lot of wasted space in the color bars and gray surround area.

Another thing that would be nice is to use a cursor that doesn't cover the pixel(s) you're trying to analyze. I think something like a hollow bulls-eye would work better. It would also be nice if the aperture of the cursor matched the sampling size. 1, 3, or 5 pixels.

Why not add a Tool Settings option to enlarge the cursor display by 2x, so it's easier to see on high resolution displays.

ColorPickerProbe.png

The Color Position Tool

Since this tool has nothing to do with positions(in fact I can't find any way to find any position info), why is it named that? I think a much better name would be "Color Probe" tool.

Again this would benefit from some tool settings in its panel. Currently there are "No Settings". Each position/probe should have it's own area settings. Currently PL uses the settings from the "Area" of the "Color Picker" panel for these settings. If you select a 3x3 setting in the Picker your positions/probes will also be 3x3. But if you change the Picker settings to 1x1 and add a new position/probe, *all* of the positions/probes will change to the new area. Very confusing. This could also use indicators that don't cover the pixel(s) and also indicate the sample size, like above, for the Picker tool.

Is there anyway to *lock* a position/probe to a layer rather than either all or active? And if that layer isn't active then automatically hide all the positions/probes locked to that layer.

Sometimes I can't easily find/see the location of multiple positions/probes. Would it be to hard to add some kind of indicator? Maybe the position/probe could blink, or change color, when you click on the position/probe readout in the "Picture Info" panel.

It would be great if you could add an option to hide all positions/probes as a check box in the Tool Settings panel.

And would you add CMYK total ink, which is in the Picker cursor display, to the position/probe readouts in the Picture Info panel? That would help a lot.

Thanks again and good luck.

Steve

[photoken]

I'm curious about the design of the color picker tool cursor display. Is there some benefit to the display being transparent?

Yes, that's an issue I raised a year ago:
http://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.ph ... lor+picker

[photoken]

The Color Position Tool
I'd like to be able to use the colour positions in the Picture Info panel to set the foreground colour and background colour -- click to set the foreground and Shift+click to set the background, as in the Color Picker tool.

I agree with the suggestion to have the position indicator be highlighted when the corresponding colour is selected in the Picture Info panel.

Also, the information in the Picture Info panel for a colour position needs to have a small rectangle showing the actual colour.