The Color Picker

Using the Color Picker

Use the Color Picker either by clicking on the Color Picker tab, or by clicking on a Color Picker button in the Parameter View. When the button is pressed down, values selected in the Color Picker are fed into the three node parameters.

 

Once you have clicked on the Color Picker button, it opens the Color Picker tab, and you can drag the cursor to select a point. Dragging across the bottom greyscale bar changes the overall value of the both the wheel and the picked color. You can also drag on the Viewer to select color from an image.

 

To animate the color values, use the associated autokey button in the Parameter Tab.

The different color channels for a node can be read by opening the subtree. There are two levels.

The first allows you to modify a channel with the use of a single slider. The channels are Red, Greeen, Blue, Hue, Saturation, Value, Temperature, Magenta/Cyan and Luminance.

The second subtree lists each channel individually, allowing you to enter expressions.

 

The channel slider buttons can also be thought of as reminders of the hotkeys for the Virtual Color Picker. The only missing parameter is Offset, which uses an O.

To use the Virtual Color Picker, hold down a channel key (Red, Green, Blue, Offset, Hue, Saturation, Value, Temperature, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Luminance), and drag the cursor anywhere along the first line:


If the Sample From Viewer switch is activated in the Color Picker tab, you can drag the cursor across a Viewer, and color is picked up from the Viewer. Sometimes you may be doing a color correction, that is, the Color Picker is linked to a Mult node. If this is the case, the realtime update of the color correction interferes with on-screen selection of color, causing a feedback loop. Switch on Use Source Buffer, and the values are taken from the parent node, not the current node. This is especially useful when doing key scrubs, as it picks the value off of the pre-keyed image.

 

The buttons on the top of the Color Picker control what values are returned when you scrub, either the current pixel's value, the average value of the pixels you scrub, the minimum value, or the maximum value of the pixels scrubbed.

 

The Color Picker also has a Palette associated with it. To select a color, click on a palette button. You can also Drag and Drop to and from any palette button or to any other Color Picker color swatch.

 

To assign a color to a Palette swatch, drag from a color swatch onto the Palette swatch. These assignments are saved if you use the Save Interface Settings function in the File menu.



Customizing the Interface for Use with Palette and Color Picker

These commands go in your ui .h file, as described under Customize Shake.

Code
Notes
nuiSetColor(1,1,0,0); 
nuiSetColor(2,1,0.5,0); 
nuiSetColor(3,1,1,0);

Assigns a color to a palette swatch, with the first number being the box it is assigned to. Values are in a range of 0 to 1.

 

nuiPushControlGroup("Color");
    nuiGroupControl("MyFunction.red");
    nuiGroupControl("MyFunction.green");
    nuiGroupControl("MyFunction.blue");
nuiPopControlGroup();
nuiPushControlWidget(
  "Color",
  nuiConnectColorTriplet(
    kRGBToggle,
    kCurrentColor,
    1
    )
  );
);
Assigns a color picker to your custom macros. This code creates a subtree named "Color" containing the three parameters red, green, and blue, although these can be any three parameters. The last function (nuiConnectColorPCtrl) selects what color space the values are returned in, what type of value, and if you want to use the source buffer or not.