Command to modulate colors

[olibclarke@…]

Oliver asks for a command to modulate hue, lightness or saturation of specified objects. This allows changing many colors at once which requires a separate command for each color currently.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Oliver Clarke
Subject: [Chimera-users] HLS color adjustments?
Date: December 23, 2015 at 11:28:39 AM PST
To: "chimera-users@… BB" <chimera-users@…>

Hi all,

Suggestion for ChimeraX: Allow tweaking (not replacing) color of selection, to adjust hue, lightness or saturation of selection (which could contain multiple colors).

This would be handy when creating duotone images, where one selection is one color and another selection is a lighter (or darker) version of the same color; Or for creating Goodsell-style images where carbons are one color and heavier elements are a darker version of the same color.

In general this would also be useful in cases where you want to edit a color that is close to but not quite the desired one - currently, launching the color editor defaults the selection to black, and it can sometimes be difficult to locate the exact color one had previously, so a way to edit colors in place would be useful for this purpose.

Another suggestion to consider - would it be possible to allow exporting to a format (perhaps SVG?) where both vector and bitmap information can be edited separately? Specifically, I’m envisioning a three-layer file, with a bitmap + text and lineart, where lineart would include pseudobonds and potentially silhouettes. This would allow easy adjustment of the thickness, style etc of silhouettes and pseudo bonds post-Chimera, and editing/reformatting of text labels. I am not sure how practical this is, but if it is feasible to implement eventually it would certainly be useful.

Cheers,
Oliver.

[Tom Goddard]

Greg added the "color modify" command to modulate current colors.