Greetings everybody,

This is something I wanted to discuss for quite some time. Namely, the way we pick colors in Krita using the various color dockers.
There is an impressive variety of color pickers in Krita, each one follows a different philosophy and introduces very interesting ideas. However, no matter which I use, there is always a feature missing. This feature is often found on another color docker in Krita, but again, that docker is missing something else.
In short, it seems to me that none of them is "there" 100% yet.

I chose the Advanced color selector because it seems to be the most...advanced color selector in Krita! And probably what most of us use as the standard picker in Krita.
And it is an awesome selector, with big diversity in color selector shapes and color model types. I mainly want to focus on the shade selector.
For the shake of clarity, I describe the color attributes in HSV (Hue Saturation Value)

The shade selector is a great feature. It creates shade variations in tone/saturation/hue from the current color, and is highly customizable.
But the results are often unexpected, especially with the generation of variation in value. For example, if I set it to generate 5 patches of value from the current color, I often do not get a value distribution in equal steps, and even the hue/saturation can be inconsistent.
Using even numbers (4,6,8,etc) in the "patches per line" field produces more weird results. Taking the value example again, if I set it to generate 6 patches of value from the current color, there will be a big value leap between the first half and the second half of the patches, no matter how many are generated.

This is obviously a technical issue, but from an artist's point I do not have a reliable system which I can use to pick shades from a given color. Additionally, the fact that everything changes every time I pick a new color, makes it very difficult to have a stable reference point and a comparison between my current color and how it is related to the shades that are generated.
In a traditional painter's palette, the colors you mix are all in front of you. You can mix your "shades" and they will stay in the palette unless you choose to erase them.

The palette docker is still under development. But even if it was fully operational, it is more of a stable, long term solution for color picking. The colors are fixed and you have to manually add,remove,reorganize them one by one.
The Artistic color Selector has a column of "light pieces" which generate a value range from the current color. But the color wheel has a very limited functionality compared to the Advanced Selector. For that matter, it would be a very interesting docker if we were able to customize the colors on the wheel. But that is still a half-measure.

I actually would like to see a combination of the palette and the artistic color selector's "LIGHT PIECES" in place of the current shade selector. I made an example to demonstrate the idea.


As you can see in the image above, I added a foreground color below the wheel. This shows you always which color is active, and is always visible.
Below we have the new shade selectors.

For this occasion we have selected 3 sets of shade selectors. According to the current system.
-I wanted full range value from black to white for the first line, so I entered 1.00 in Value Delta
-Full range saturation for the second line, so I entered 1.00 in Saturation Delta.
-A slight variation in Hue, so about 0.20 in Hue Delta.
And we are choosing to have 9 patches per line.

What is the difference with the old shade selector? Let's take the image below as an example.



In the first example, we have a middle value, saturated blue color. If we pick a 50% brighter version of that blue, the saturation and Hue patches shift their value to match that color.
But the calue patches remain unchanged! Why? Because by making the color brighter we only changed its value. Since the value patches cover the full range of values, and we chose to have them generated in 9 steps, there is no need to change anything there.
Additionally, the value patches do not need to match the value of the current color. Again, since we chose the 9 steps, we already have the value range we need.
In other words, the value patches take into account the hue and saturation but not the value of the current color.

The same goes for the other attributes. So, if we pick a 75% less saturated version of that first blue, it is the saturation line that remains unchanged. The value and hue lines shift their saturation to match the current color.


I cannot judge how difficult that would be from a programmer's point of view, especially if we take into account the more sophisticated HSI or HSY' systems. But from an artist's point, I think it would be a very, VERY useful feature!

To finish with the example images, below the shade selectors I added a "favourite colors" palette. The user would be able to quickly save any colors to this palette and possibly export them as palette files. This could be very similar to the actual palette docker. The additional feature would be the possibility to save lines of patches generated in the shade selector.
For example, we are working on an image where we use the blue color extensively. Instead of manually adding to the palette docker each version of the blue one by one, we will be able to add an entire line from the shade selector to the favourite colors section by clicking on the plus button.

Finally, the colors from image & Color History are also great features. It would be great if we had better control over them, like organizing them by hue/saturation/value and being able to save them as palettes.

These are my thoughts about the advanced selector and colors in Krita. I hope that enough people made it until the end of the article and are willing to discuss this here. I would be very interested to hear the opinions of other artists, and of course some feedback from our awesome developers.

Let's make Krita a better companion and guide through the immense jungle of digital colors!

I can assure you there is no such thing as a 100% color selector. We went through countless iterations of them and almost every Krita version changes them a bit. Putting everything into one docker is also not a solution as other users don't like that as well. The only way to make it somewhat work for everybody is to have separate dockers that can be easily combined.

The development of the palette docker is finished. At least as the original developer of the docker, I think that it fulfills all the original requirements
Of course other could still add features to it.

Hi slangkamp,
thank you for your reply and my deep apologies for my late response!
I have been trying to find some alternative solution for color picking in order to improve my workflow. Well, now krita 3.0 is out, and I hope that the updated palette docker is on its way
I went all the way to the other side now and I am discussing about a traditional-style mixer/scratchpad here:
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=288&t=133217

Perhaps it seems unrelated to the advanced docker discussion we have here, but I guess that this would be as good a solution to this issue as any.

Thanks again