PC users, if good and useful please report for 'star' distribution : )

That's a bronze star then. Will wait for 2 more raves for gold ; )


@erikl, mac user here.

How do you get the colours into your editor? Do you have to enter it manually? If so I can't really see this being any easier than picking the between colours yourself.

Ideally such a feature would be integrated into an editor, but failing that you could drop an image containing the between colours into the clipboard, then the user can paste it onto their canvas and grab from there. This would also make it easier to output an arbitrary number of colours as a gradient of however many steps the user chooses.

EDIT:
How do you get colours from the editor into your calculator?
Is there a standard for storing colours in in the clipboard?
If not you could take the colour of the first pixel in the image in the clipboard.
You could take both colours at once when the clipboard contains an exactly 2x1 or 1x2 image, which the user has copied from a selection of the colour interface in the editor. Likewise if the clipboard image is of arbitrary size, but contains exactly 2 colours.
You could also have a pick-colour-from-screen tool so you can colour pick from the editor canvas.


Edited by surt - 09 December 2007 at 2:33pm

I feel that the future of this program is neither in commandline or GUI usage,  but as a plugin for your image editor of choice.

If implemented as a plugin that simply looks at the current FG and BG colors, and sets the FG color to the calculated antialiasing color, this could work very fast indeed.

From my personal experience (I've written a similar plugin for GIMP), that would also address
"Erik, how about adding a function so you can choose you want more colors between those 2? For example, 2 colors, 3 colors and 4 colors between 2 base colors could be usefull"
-- since, when you can access this function v.quickly, you can easily build a gradient of whatever length you want, just by repeatedly eyedropping and using the function to generate a new color.

@MoD:
It's piecemeal-linear (that is, each segment is linear, with segment-delimitation as you chose. The method is subdivision.
You can produce any oddly-sized interpolation (eg 1,3,5,7,..) like this, and a close enough version of any evenly shaped (2,4,6,8,..) gradient like this.


The real benefit in this is the piecemeal blending; it's more flexible about how many shades you have and how they're distributed; important for restricted palettes. And you can guarantee linearity for any chosen segment

Here's an image showing it, with the exact linear gradient below each one.
A little more effort produces nearly perfect results; I left that out because it would make the explanation even more difficult to follow.

(odd numbers of colors just require a bit more effort.)
Truthfully, the way I end up using this plugin is partially interpolation tool and partially a color tuner.

My personal opinion on gradients is that linear interpolation (the only type that is doable when you only know the two points A and B) is boring; I often use it simply because its the quickest and most predictable to use.
I believe cubic spline interpolation, knowing all the endpoints in the color gradient, is much better: my tests show it to have both more pop and more overall smoothness.
If a tool was to implement gradient generation based on multiple segments, I'd expect it to use some type of spline interpolation.


Lastly -- I think concern with getting color mixes 'exactly right' is academic. As a matter of course, pixellers largely eyeball their colors, ne?