photoken hat geschrieben:The additional colouring for selected layers is superfluous, because the checkbox already gives that information:
layer colours.png
Those additional layer colours make the Layer panel look too "busy", cluttered and confusing.
Can we have an option to turn off that selected layer colour? There seems to be enough space for that disable option in the dialog:
displlay options.png
I have done a little testing, and visually it looks much better when PL's interface colour is 128 or higher.
Check out my workspace:
screen_small.jpg
highres version here:
http://estructor.altervista.org/pl/screen.jpg
As you can tell, it is actually very helpful to the eyes to discriminate between selected layers. At a setting of 128 my layer panel workspace looks very good
I have mentioned this before: our eyes CANNOT distinguish those small checkboxes when they fall outside the very limited fovea centralis of our eyes.
Wikipedia extract [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis]:
The fovea sees only the central two degrees of the visual field, (approximately twice the width of your thumbnail at arm's length).[12] If an object is large and thus covers a large angle, the eyes must constantly shift their gaze to subsequently bring different portions of the image into the fovea (as in reading).
On my screen, and at the distance I work, it is physically impossible for my eyes (and human eyes in general) to distinguish which layers are multiple selected in the screenshot above with only the checkboxes. I am forced to keep shifting my eyes up and down to confirm which layers are selected - very tiresome.
WITH the additional selection colour I have no issues with this now. My eyes see the darker grey coloured rectangle at the bottom when I focus on the top selected darkest layer.
Now, aside from this, I do agree with you that there are some problems with the implementation. In dark mode (under 128) the colours do look quite distracting, and in Ken's example the problems are accentuated because there happen to be only three layers visible in the layer panel, with two selected. This results in three different shades of gray, and since there is no other visual context, it looks confusing which layers are selected, and which layer is not.
As you can tell from my screenshot, this poses less of an issue as long as there is a context of other non-selected layers displayed. In other applications, like Photoshop, the layer selection is solved by introducing a different highlight colour for seleced layers (Photoshop uses a mid-dark blue).
Secondly, with the GUI set to 127 or darker, or a brighter GUI setting, the current layer selection colour tints do not work as well. I agree with Ken on that point. The user requires more manual control, in my opinion. These selection colours are very hard (impossible?) to get right for all user preferences and GUI darkness settings in PL. (I assume that is one of the reasons for having a limited number of GUI darkness settings in applications like Photoshop, i.e., to prevent colour clashes when too much freedom is allowed).
Perhaps we could indeed have these additional options in the User Interface preferences:
1) turn off the selection highlighting for multiple selected layers for users who prefer the traditional checkbox only.
2) two additional layer selection colour boxes that control the colours for the active selected layer and one colour box for other selected layers.
If anything, I feel the time has come to offer us users a theme option, so we can create interface themes and share those with other users. It would also allow for a couple of controlled basic themes to be shipped with Photoline. In this case users could be given more control over the specific interface colours. That is the solution the Blender community uses, and it works really well.
Or just provide a way to save preference files the same way we can save presets for tools in PL. Users can switch to specific preference setups depending on the work they do.
Anyway, I do like the current selection highlighting - it already improves my workflow. I think users should be given a bit more control over the colours, though. They do not work that well in a dark PL GUI.
