Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

waterwingz

12138

« on: 18 / October / 2014, 20:49:33 »

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The legibility of CHDK OSD values can be greatly improved if their background color is a semi-transparent grey. Recent CHDK ports use custom color palette code get twelve custom colors that are guaranteed to be "correct" in shooting and playback modes. What I propose is adding a 13th standardized color - semi-transparent grey - as part of the custom palette color mod.

Note that this has already been done on the Powershot N and the SX200 (palette 13). The SX200 takes this a step farther and defines COLOR_ALT_BG and COLOR_BG to use the semi-transparent grey. I don't have that camera but I'll bet it looks great !

Adding this and making it standard will be a bit of work. Making the background a standard color also means modifying this : http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Lua/Drawings#Colors

Am I missing anything here?

« Last Edit: 18 / October / 2014, 21:09:15 by waterwingz »

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Ported : A1200 SD940 G10 Powershot N G16

waterwingz

12138

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #1 on: 19 / October / 2014, 18:43:54 »

While I'm posting about custom colors, I did a little test script based on a suggestion from nafraf. Might be worth adding to the CHDK/SCRIPT/TEST folder?

Link : http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=11831.msg117495#msg117495

colors.lua (1.85 kB - downloaded 32 times.)

« Last Edit: 19 / October / 2014, 18:46:19 by waterwingz »

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Ported : A1200 SD940 G10 Powershot N G16

fabri22

208

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #2 on: 20 / October / 2014, 04:15:19 »

Love these things

The semi-transparent grey as background for CHDK OSD values is a very nice idea.
Testing the colors.lua, dark and light blue look like "plain" blue on both my ixus (in shooting and playback mode).
Or a port issue with both cameras ... or daltonism

Remaining colors are fine.

« Last Edit: 20 / October / 2014, 04:25:29 by fabri22 »

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IXUS 125 HS (firm. 101a) - IXUS 115 HS (firm. 101c) - IXUS 117 HS (firm. 101a) IR-ized

waterwingz

12138

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #3 on: 20 / October / 2014, 10:13:15 »

My A1200 has a custom color palette and the blue colors do not look a lot different.

One more thing to look into.

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Ported : A1200 SD940 G10 Powershot N G16

philmoz

3450

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #4 on: 20 / October / 2014, 15:03:47 »

Quote from: waterwingz on 20 / October / 2014, 10:13:15

My A1200 has a custom color palette and the blue colors do not look a lot different.

One more thing to look into.

Shades of blue were not implemented for script colors - original palettes did not include dark blue (I added this in my custom color code for completeness).

Attached patch is a quick fix for palette 13.

Phil.

blue.diff (2.14 kB - downloaded 21 times.)

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CHDK ports:
sx30is (1.00c, 1.00h, 1.00l, 1.00n & 1.00p)
g12 (1.00c, 1.00e, 1.00f & 1.00g)
sx130is (1.01d & 1.01f)
ixus310hs (1.00a & 1.01a)
sx40hs (1.00d, 1.00g & 1.00i)
g1x (1.00e, 1.00f & 1.00g)
g5x (1.00c, 1.01a, 1.01b)
g7x2 (1.01a, 1.01b, 1.10b)

waterwingz

12138

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #5 on: 20 / October / 2014, 21:14:08 »

Hmmmm ... made the same change to palette 16 for the A1200. Much better :

The rest of gui_draw.h is a bit of a mess. Different palettes apparently having different definitions and menus and backgrounds all changing between palettes for the same thing. Not sure if it's too dangerous to try and clean up or not.

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Ported : A1200 SD940 G10 Powershot N G16

koshy

1096

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #6 on: 20 / October / 2014, 21:22:09 »

Is that lua script at a point where it'd be helpful to test it on a bunch of dryos cameras or do you plan to do more on it? If it's there what else to record while testing it? On some cameras (I105 comes to mind) I noticed that CHDK menus use an orange or yellow in combination with another bright color of all things (unpleasant to read) do you think that will become obvious from the palette not working there or is that just an imperfect choice by someone? Should there also be shots of the ALT-Menu and CHDK overlays in shooting mode to illustrate what it all looks like for a given platform?

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Koshy had a little ELPH which wasn't white as snow but everywhere that Koshy went the ELPH was sure to go. (actually an SD, but that detail ruins the rhyme...)

waterwingz

12138

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #7 on: 20 / October / 2014, 21:47:50 »

Quote from: koshy on 20 / October / 2014, 21:22:09

Is that lua script at a point where it'd be helpful to test it on a bunch of dryos cameras or do you plan to do more on it?

The script will show the colors that can be displayed by a script on any CHDK camera (dryos or vxworks) in shooting and playback modes. If the colors look like the screen shots I posted then all is good. If not, then GUI stuff via scripts could look goofy or illegible on that camera.

Quote

If it's there what else to record while testing it? On some cameras (I105 comes to mind) I noticed that CHDK menus use an orange or yellow in combination with another bright color of all things (unpleasant to read) do you think that will become obvious from the palette not working there or is that just an imperfect choice by someone?

You can see all the available colors in any Canon mode using the Draw Palette option in the Color Settings menu. Scrolling around that screen gives you the 8 bit hex value for each cell and that value can be used to set the #defines for the camera's palette defined in core/gui_draw.h For any given port, the colors were picked by the person doing the port, who may have never seen another CHDK port for reference, or who may just have had a like for hideous clashing color combinations.

The problem is that not all colors are available in some cameras AND the color mappings change between modes ( i.e. shooting vs playback). Depending on the skills and knowledge of the person doing the port, they might have been able to assign palette values that are the same in both modes but I have seen ports where the menu colors (for example) change between shooting and playback modes.

All that changes if the port supports custom palette colors (which incidentally can also be seen in the Draw Palette screen).

Quote

Should there also be shots of the ALT-Menu and CHDK overlays in shooting mode to illustrate what it all looks like for a given platform?

Colored icons as well. The hard part is that there are 17 different CHDK palettes and between 23 and 56 different color definitions in a palette. All of which have been added piece-wise over the last 8 years or so. Not sure where to even start trying to harmonize all that.

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Ported : A1200 SD940 G10 Powershot N G16

nafraf

1308

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #8 on: 20 / October / 2014, 22:13:37 »

Camera Features Table has two new columns:
BPLT : "Bitmap Palette", shows the palette number used in the port.
CCOL: "Custom Colors", shows if custom colors are loaded into the camera color palette.

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philmoz

3450

Re: Custom Colors : standardizing a semi-transparent grey

« Reply #9 on: 20 / October / 2014, 22:19:43 »

Quote from: waterwingz on 20 / October / 2014, 21:47:50

Not sure where to even start trying to harmonize all that.

One place would be to simplify the UI color options - do we really need user selectable colors for all the UI elements?

From nafrafs post it looks like palette 3 is no longer used so that's one quick cleanup that could be done.

Phil.

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CHDK ports:
sx30is (1.00c, 1.00h, 1.00l, 1.00n & 1.00p)
g12 (1.00c, 1.00e, 1.00f & 1.00g)
sx130is (1.01d & 1.01f)
ixus310hs (1.00a & 1.01a)
sx40hs (1.00d, 1.00g & 1.00i)
g1x (1.00e, 1.00f & 1.00g)
g5x (1.00c, 1.01a, 1.01b)
g7x2 (1.01a, 1.01b, 1.10b)