Re: [Gimp-gui] GIMP Theme UI now and future.

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

On 01/26/2016 12:55 PM, Gez wrote:
> El mar, 26-01-2016 a las 20:40 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine escribió:
> > On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:45 PM, Gez wrote:
> >
> > > I think that, as Sven pointed out (from elle's comments), that the
> > > padding color is the most important adjustment piece, not
> > > necessarily
> > > the theme.
> >
> > Only if you always have padding as opposed to working on a
> > larger-than-viewport image at 100% zoom.
>
> Sure, but:
> - You usually inspect your whole image zoomed out, which is likely to
> show some padding.
> - When you apply primary color grading, you also inspect the image as a
> whole.
> - A neutral, middle gray in the UI won't affect your color perception
> adversely for localized manipulation and secondary grading.
>
> G.

As Gez, Sven, and myself have pointed out, the color of the immediate 
image surround matters a great deal because it influences the appearance 
of the image. What actually constitutes the image surround depends on 
the user's particular "at the moment" setup: It might be the desktop 
itself in MWM with a shrink-wrapped image, or the canvas padding, or the 
theme itself if the image takes up enough of the screen.

The "paper white" values that I gave for various printer profiles only 
had the purposes of establishing that "paper white" is not the same as 
100% monitor white and for suggesting the maximum Lightness for even the 
Lightest theme shouldn't be 100% monitor white, even if the goal is 
emulating "paper white". The main effect of a theme with large amounts 
of 100% monitor white would be eyestrain.

It seems to me that the currently proposed five themes 
(https://github.com/Draekko-RAND/gimp-themes) have a nice range of 
tonality, from the very dark "Dark Side of GIMP" to the much lighter 
"Light" theme, and it would be nice if GIMP provided all five themes by 
default.

Changing themes in Preferences is easy to do. Changing icons is also 
easy to do.

Changing the canvas padding color -arguably more important than the 
theme color - isn't so easy to do. Well, changing the color isn't 
difficult, though it requires several mouse clicks to accomplish. But 
finding a previously used color isn't easy - the previously used colors 
keep disappearing and the little squares of remembered colors are pretty 
useless because they aren't color-managed.

It would be nice if there were a way to set up, keep, and quickly choose 
from a set of user-established canvas padding colors, independent of 
choosing a theme or a set of icons (and hopefully someone will tell me 
this is already possible by doing XYZ . . . ).

Elle