Colour Improvements

[ASUNDER]

I'm not seeing a recent colours area anywhere except for the wheels tab:

If someone likes using other tabs instead they have to return to the wheels tab every time they want to reference a recent colour.
That's no good.  Can there be a recent colours tab or floating tab or something that is always available.  Or just put the recents group in every tab.  Also a document swatches palette.  With the 'add to document swatch' button on there, available at all times.  Even better combine the two into one tab.  A recents and document colours tab.

That's what this is (in the pic).  It's the document colours and the most recent colours all in one place, always available, never hidden.  No extra clicks or other actions required to access the colours, add to it, remove from it, or modify them:

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In the 'New Project' dialog window can you make a setting that creates a document swatch palette automatically.  So we could have that enabled as part of a template project, so it's always made for every project.

(Also don't know why margins, bleed and guides aren't saved to project templates, but that's off topic from colours)

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Could we have dividers between swatch subgroups please.  Including when we do things like create 'chord from swatch'.  Currently it's just a long line of swatches without any organization.  Currently what I have been doing is adding a white swatch to divide my subgroups:

When we click on a colour tab to focus it, can the arrow keys move sliders by one percent per key press.  I'm not seeing how to change brightness only, except to use the sliders tab and use the mouse, which is coarse instead of fine.  Clicking in the value box, typing out the value, then pressing enter is way too many steps.  Why doesn't the mouse wheel work on sliders?  Or why does the value boxes auto deselect?  Why can't we type in a value and if we don't like it we can type in another value without having to click it again.

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It would be ideal to have MIDI controller support to link up colour things to hardware knobs.  It could be omni and persistent across projects.  So I could link up one knob to a brightness slider and whatever colour I have currently selected, that knob would modify its brightness.  I could make permanent links that work with any colour in any project.  It just has to be mounted as the current colour for the link to work on it.  For example, in my pic the pink stroke is the current colour.

It would be kind of like Davinci Resolve's Fairlight control surfaces.  This would be a tricky thing to do, considering relative or absolute knobs.  And that most things have a 0 - 100% value, which is incompatible with the 0 - 127 cc MIDI scale.  So there would have to be formulas applied under the hood depending on the nature of the knob and what it's linking up with.  If not, at least basic MIDI links would be nice to have.  Or is there any HID integration or python scripts or something?

[Pšenda]

29 minutes ago, ASUNDER said:

'Im not seeing a recent colours area anywhere except for the wheels tab

For example Swatches panel?

https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/pages/Panels/swatchesPanel.html

[ASUNDER]

45 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

For example Swatches panel?

No, I meant the color mods panel.  Color wheel, sliders, boxes, tints.
The problem with the recents not being in the other three places on the mod tab is you can't choose a recent colour and modify it right there.
If you choose a recent colour from the swatches you have to go to the colour mod panel to modify it.
What would be ideal is the recents and document swatches to be independent of all those things; it's own area that can be positioned elsewhere.

[Alfred]

19 minutes ago, ASUNDER said:

If you choose a recent colour from the swatches you have to go to the colour mod panel to modify it.

If you right-click on a swatch in the Swatches panel you should find that the context menu offers an ‘Edit Fill…’ option. 

[ASUNDER]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

If you right-click on a swatch in the Swatches panel you should find that the context menu offers an ‘Edit Fill…’ option. 

Oh cool.  That looks handy.

This is what my idea looks like:

A little rectangular area where the recent and document swatches live.  Also the black white grey clear.  They are not bound to any colour tab; they are always visible.  This would get rid of the recent palettes elsewhere.  It's in between the tabs, it isn't a tab itself.
For me I put my layers on the left so that means I could afford this on the right side.  Wherever someone would want to put it.  They could dock it somewhere or hide it or whatever.

The point is to have it always visible.  A left click to apply it to the current colour on the wheel.  Shift click to apply it to the current stroke.  Ctrl + Click to overwrite the current colour onto that swatch.  Right click for the swatch menu.  Recents are always most recent to the left and it cycles to the right so you're never confused as to which one is most recent.  User could swap this behavior to right to left if they wanted.

Top row is recents, bottom row is the document swatches.  You get 12 or 16 colours or something.  Click the hamburger header button to get the other colours, or a drop down.  Or we could keep everything else as it is.  Whatever is best.