Prisma Palette: Light based Photoshop picker plugin.
polycounter lvl 10
EDIT:
What version of photoshop do you use? Trying to work on where to focus efforts: http://www.strawpoll.me/12307617
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Hey guys! long time no post. Finally back here to talk about the next iteration on the idea i had with colour constructor a a year and a half back.
I had a brain wave that instead of constructing colour from objects one at a time, i could construct the whole damn palette at once, and provide a way to also reverse engineer local colours from a painted scene given this information. Essentially generating what I'm going to dub, a mapped 3d gamut mask. There surely has to be a better name for it than that though.
And so with that revelation i give you .
EDIT: new promo image.
I recorded a quick video last night going over the basic functionality,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpMABCUQAnY
And i have started writing out a tutorial on the full possibilities.
http://colourconstructor.com/home/prisma-panel-tutorial
Right now this is most definitley a beta build, and i'm hoping that the polycount community will be able to work wonders again and help me make this from a cool idea, into an indispensable tool in a digi painters toolbox.
I'm currently selling it for $12 which i see this as a fair price given i am working on this full time and it provides functionality never before seen in a painting program.
Currently there is still some clunky functionality in places, and performance on mac has a bug causing it to chug, which i expect to get cleared up very quickly. (it runs like a knife through butter on windows)
What version of photoshop do you use? Trying to work on where to focus efforts: http://www.strawpoll.me/12307617
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Hey guys! long time no post. Finally back here to talk about the next iteration on the idea i had with colour constructor a a year and a half back.
I had a brain wave that instead of constructing colour from objects one at a time, i could construct the whole damn palette at once, and provide a way to also reverse engineer local colours from a painted scene given this information. Essentially generating what I'm going to dub, a mapped 3d gamut mask. There surely has to be a better name for it than that though.
And so with that revelation i give you .
EDIT: new promo image.
I recorded a quick video last night going over the basic functionality,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpMABCUQAnYAnd i have started writing out a tutorial on the full possibilities.
http://colourconstructor.com/home/prisma-panel-tutorial
Right now this is most definitley a beta build, and i'm hoping that the polycount community will be able to work wonders again and help me make this from a cool idea, into an indispensable tool in a digi painters toolbox.
I'm currently selling it for $12 which i see this as a fair price given i am working on this full time and it provides functionality never before seen in a painting program.
Currently there is still some clunky functionality in places, and performance on mac has a bug causing it to chug, which i expect to get cleared up very quickly. (it runs like a knife through butter on windows)
Replies
The OSX bug has now been fixed for Prisma Palette, and should run equally as well as the windows build.
Now i get to sit down and make some art myself with this tool and make some training material!
Capture colour currently only works if you directly pick a colour from the canvas as it's really confusing about if it should capture the local colour or the lit colour otherwise, i'll change this in the future. If picking is broken then that won't ever work.
Couldn't a case be made for it to be available not only as a PS extension but also as a standalone tool ? That would open up the tool to an even bigger audience (including users of older versions of Photoshop...) and would also have the benefit of being immune to unexpected CC updates.
I am bringing this up because PS (on Windows at least) allows for alt-color picking outside of the Photoshop environment, and little programs like Instant Eyedropper can also color pick from anywhere on the desktop. And even without that I would imagine that copy-pasting hex color inputs could be a viable way to feed colors to the app. Would it make sense ?
Yeah i think there is certainly a case for it, and i'll probably explore it in the future. Currently my focus however is trying to make a tool that fluidly and naturally fits into a workflow inside of a painting program, which in a lot of ways means that it's about trying to remove as much friction as possible. So that means i am aiming at a much smaller market than what i could and will be in the future, for the sake of really working out what this sort of tool can do for painters. There is a really high cost for being a developer who is developing new ideas, because there is actually nothing i can look to for inspiration about how something like this should work.
From a business standpoint, trying to reach wider audiences through universal software is always going to be a better option. I think that a nice middle ground is that with some software there is the possibility of using network ports to communicate with the painting program. I'm currently researching how feasible this is to be, so as to open up support for Photoshop cs6. There isn't much in the way of documentation about that feature i can find however.
I personally have found that relying on API's provided by other companies is just a nasty experience, where if something goes wrong, you need to patch around it rather than do a proper job. (code inexplicably not working with no error messages being the flavor of this project)
I rewrote the colour system so that you don't get weird behavior when saturation is at 0. I also made the layer buttons accessible on the main page, which makes them way more usable.
I also wrote a FAQ so i don't keep getting asked the same questions. Naturally it's mostly about why i'm not supporting that much stuff atm.
http://colourconstructor.com/home/prisma-palette
Finally working on a process video for this thing. This is the wip of the image i'll be demoing. This will be a timelapse just to show people what's possible and i'll also record a utilitarian tutorial.
I don't know if this feature is already available, but would it be possible to let us assign hotkeys to the different light layers? Being able to toggle on/off by simply pressing a key on the keyboard would make it a lot quicker than clicking a button each time (especially when you have to toggle on/off to pick colors, etc.).
But regardless of that this tool looks shit hot and I'm picking up my copy today.
If you notice there is a swatch on the right of the local colour. Also there is local mode that displays the picker as the local colour not the lit colour. I find both are useful for different reasons.
I'll also record a narrated video version for the people who prefer that.
http://colourconstructor.com/home/stage-fright-tutorial
I made a trailer showing off the basic functionality in a minute.
here's a quick test from me
I'll do more tests on it, not really used to painting like this, I usually just end up using lighting schemes from photos or past paintings, hope you'll make more in-depth tutorials especially on light color picking and provide more examples of lighting schemes.
I think I'll probably just do some basic primitive scenes to test it out properly first trying to gauge my lighting scheme first and get better at predicting the output beforehand.
As far as I'm concerned, even if people don't end up using it to day to day, and it teaches you way more about light then it should easily be worth the price of entry. And it seems to be doing that for a lot of people
Can't wait to get more features out to people too.
I just gave your image a shot. Seems the white object has a bit of specularity on it, which will boost the brightness the lit area up more than just the local. So if you want the exact settings you'll have to render an object that has no spec on it. Of course, there could be also a gamma curve applied to the output image that i'm not matching. I'll have a think about if there is a nice solution to that problem, especially if i write a tool to extract lighting from an image.
I was thinking of actually programming in resizing of that tomorrow as well. it's been annoying me too!
let me edd more details: after i run the isntaller script, notthing appears on the "Extensions" list.
Emailed you already asking for refund or replacement
Can't wait to try this plugin.
I put a lot of work into this update and it should now feel like a much more professional tool.
Release notes are here.
http://colourconstructor.com/home/prisma-palette-beta-4-release
I'll write up more about it once i get some more sleep.
I'm working on documentation atm. Still early drafts. http://documentation.colourconstructor.com/
A couple of questions:
I've set up an ambient and key light like in the tutorial page. But besides name, do these need to be identified or tagged as such by the program? Ambient and key light are going to effect a scene differently so I'm not clear on how that is done. Is that done? I mean besides naming the lights that, is there a way that they need to be be set as ambient or key explicitly inside the program? If I put one light in the 1st lighting set up, and another in the 2, does it read 1 as ambient and 2 as key?
Is 3 another kind of light?
How exactly is the shadeless color of the material set? I see 3 tabs at the top. A lightbulb (lights) a cube (I'm guessing the material color?) and an eyedropper. Is the cube where I set the color of the material? And if I go back over to the lighting tab and click around inside the palette and go back to the material tab it's changed right?
Is the material tab basically just setting the hue, and then all saturation and brightness information is being handled by the lighting panel?
EDIT: Okay I see the documentation link further in the thread. Let me read that.
Okay, reading stuff and wanted some clarity. Some of this may be due to my lack of technical experience in digital lighting and may be very basic questions but I figure it's best to read, research, and ask what I don't understand than just pound my head against a wall.
You say that the local color tab displays the "normal gamut". Do you mean normal as in a polygon normal? Or do you just mean the color of the object if it were unlit? I know this may sound like a stupid question but I know what a normal is in 3d, and what it's usually used for in English, but I'm not sure if there's some larger idea that it rests on 3D that would make it relevant here, so I don't know if you're using it in a technical way I'm unfamiliar with or just to mean "standard color"
Local color is just the color of the unlit object right? I've read that bump maps were also called "local maps" so I'm guessing that is maybe a related term?
Most of my original questions were answered except for how one differentiates ambient and key light in the program. Ambient and Key would effect lighting differently right, so is that enforced programmatically somehow, or can you pretty much name any layer you want and naming it key is just a personal convention?
Here is what I've tried:
1. Set the ambient light to a grey color on a white object.
Result: When ambient light enabled, nothing changes whatsoever. I use the color picker (ctrl+click), and I get the same tone for whatever I color I pick up. If I disable it, I just get black.
2. Next I add a key light. With the key light disabled and ambient enabled, I grab the same neutral grey color. Then enable the key light it and paint the color on the same grey ambient color. I adjust the key light and paint until it looks the same. So now what?
Result: If I have ambient enabled, I pick a color and it stays the same as previous. If I switch the key light on, it modifies the current color on the fly to be brighter. If I switch the ambient off and only the key light on, I get a darker color but it doesn't appear to be a true shadow. How do I get the shadow color?
I was thinking it would work by setting the ambient color, then a light. Then whenever I grab a color I can automatically switch between shadow, ambient, and highlight or have a swatch generated with the highlight/shadow color. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not understanding how this is supposed to work. Should I be in a different mode? What is the difference between light picker mode and local color mode exactly?
For example, if these two color ranges described white pants and a blue shirt, how would you extract the light information and use that to create other colors with coherent shadows/highlights?
Edit: Ah, it seems I have to pick the color and then turn on the ambient light on to get the shadow color. If I pick the color with ambient light already on and paint, does it output the exact same color as it appears?
Edit 2: But then how can I toggle ambient light on and off with a shortcut so I can get the shadow color? If I hit f2 (I already set up the shortcut), it just toggles between lights that are on. There is no way to toggle to a state where they are all off.
Edit 3: now when I try setting the key light, the color actually turns DARKER. What? It seems that occasionally this is fixed if I toggle keylight off, pick the color again and turn it back on, but the green light only comes on when the resulting color is darker than the original. Weird.
Edit 4: after about 6 hours of experimentation trying to copy the color scheme from a photo, it seems it's impossible to go from a mid-tone to a shadow. Only possible to go from a mid-tone to a highlight. For example, I can select a color and go from red to pink, but when I switch off the keylight again it doesn't return to red, but a brown instead. No combination of switching off lights and color picking gets me from the pink back to the original red.
@proceye
I'm just reading this trying to work out what your misunderstanding is.
It seems to me that you are attempting to use one light for the lit area and one light for the ambient area. Which isn't going to work. Instead you will want an ambient which is always on, and then the light will turn on and off ontop of that. This is how it works in 3d graphics, there is no need to differentiate between an ambient and direct light in code because the math is the same.
In terms of colour picking seeming random, you need to colour pick with the right light settings on, because it reverse engineers the colour you pick back to the local based on what lights are on. So if you have your shadow colour settings on you should be picking from the shadows, and if you are picking from the light area, you need your light settings on. It's impossible for the plugin to know if you are picking from shadow or lit area otherwise.
I'll see how i can clarify if you are still confused.
@TheDonquixotic
Hi!
i just meant albedo by normal/local colour. Most users aren't 3d people, so it's a tossup if i should use 3d terminology or keep it simple, which i can see has caused some confusion.