cowile/palette-pick

Color picker and color scheme manager.

Palette Pick

Color picker and color scheme manager

Current state

This repository currently contains the following:

• A minimal C++ library that is mostly a wrapper around ImageMagick's C++ library.
• Command-line tool mkstripes, which generates an image with stripes of specified colors.
• Command-line tool mkwheel, which generates an image showing a specified subset of a specified colorspace (e.g. all values of lightness and saturation for a given hue).
• Command-line tool getcolors, which prints a list of hex colors from a specified image file, optionally after colors in the image are reduced via quantization.

Reasons for creating Palette Pick

I created this project because I wanted to use Linux desktop software for management of color palettes that had the features I wanted. At the time I began developing this project I actively searched for such software and found the existing alternatives did not satisfy my needs. Long story short Gpick is one of the most feature-rich previously existing software tools approaching the ideal I was able to find, but I found its user interface clumsy and limited and I found a few features either lacking or difficult to find.

Ideally the project will end up with a C++ library, a collection of command-line tools, and a GUI tool that covers various features relevant to color picking, generating color schemes, and generally manipulating collections of colors in various formats.

Ideally some of the featues of this software will include things such as:

• Import an image from which to generate a color palette, with control over which parts of the image or colors are prioritized and best-fitting the palette to a palette configuration (such as an analogous palette, or a split complementary palette).

• Import an arbitrary text file with color hex values, such as a color scheme configuration file (e.g. Vim color scheme, window manager theme colors), display the colors and infer their names from their associated keywords in the configuration file.

• Export a color palette to a configuration file (e.g. a Vim color scheme file or a window manager theme file), or export as a pretty-printed list of hex colors, or export as a color-indexed .png file for which the colors and their names can be easily referenced in an image viewer.

• Generate a color scheme of various configurations with fine-grained control over number of colors generated.

Dependencies

• C++17

• Boost (project page, source)

• Armadillo (project page, source)

• ImageMagick (project page, source)

Building and testing

To build the C++ library run make lib.

To build command-line tools run make tools.

GUI software is not yet implemented.

Testing is not yet implemented.

Documentation

Documentation beyond code comments is not yet arranged.