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yCOLOR, color palette creation
greek, iris-chrysopteros (golden-winged)
daily use in production
yCOLOR is a shared library to create aesthetic color combinations and schemes, highly differentiated color sequences for large datasets, and real-time color skinning services to all my programs so i do not have to rely on my questionable taste.
while the code is all mine, the visual concept and interface is 90% based on paletton.com. that site is awesome, but i required real-time interfacing with my applications; and, needed to add additional color-related capabilities rather than then have multiple sources.
artistic color wheel. while arguments can be made for many color sequences, the artistic version as shown to the left tends to produce more aesthetically pleasing results.
degree. all colors are referred to by degree around the color wheel, i.e. 0 is red at the top, then 90 is gold, and 210 is cyan.
labels. while the wheel can be presented without labels, i find them somehow comforting ;) to each there own. type :label hide to remove them and :label show to bring them back. they default as hidden for cleanliness. the “:” calls up my universal command line. you can also use menus to toggle them.
selecting. to actually change the color, type :deg 100 to move to the honey color as the base.
color layout. by selecting a color degree, a harmony of complements, color saturation, and color value; the library creates a color palette .
base. selected as above. this is :deg 190
harmony. the color harmony dictates the other three colors, positive, negative, and complement. the relative sizes are a general indicator of how much to use them.
selection. to change the harmony, use the command line also, type :har sqr to get each to be 90 degree increments.
saturation and value. HSV color adjustments and use commands similar to the other two, such as :sat pale and :val rich.
quick. the combined request looks like :palette 90 pastel dark
the interface below allows me to experiment and find an aesthetic blend for a given program. this program is called iris.
the true interface is going into any of my opengl programs and typing the :pal 210 vivid strong everything will change in real-time. it’s very cool.
the base API is yCOLOR_palette (deg, har, sat, val) for setup, and finally yCOLOR_opengl (major, minor, alpha) to set a particular color before drawing.
there are other options, but this is 90% of my use.
source code is GPL3 licensed, https://github.com/heatherlyrobert/yCOLOR