Color schemes

Hi

Some people do change their colours but I recommend you limit what you do.

Remember that your settings are not recorded in the design so other people

reviewing your design will see their colour settings. This one reason alone

suggests you should only use the first eight colours and their highlighted

versions (the next row of the palette).

The simplest change is to make a decision on whether to use Alpha blending

or not. Turning it off suits many people.

I use the default colours (black palette) with one change. I have changed

the highlighted colour, used for airwires from yellow to Magenta.

HTH

Warren

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Am 22.01.2015 um 00:19 schrieb Warren Brayshaw:

Remember that your settings are not recorded in the design so other people

reviewing your design will see their colour settings.

I choose to disagree:

  - Yes, other people might want to see my designs.

  - BUT I route LOTS of hours in front of the screen, and they don't, so

    I prefer to see some optimised colours for myself and,

  - in case I want to sent the design to other people, just use

    different colour settings then (e.g., the default).

  - As a matter of fact, I don't even do that, because all other people

    I send the designs to are using the same EAGLE installation, anyway,

    because they find the default CadSoft colours suboptimal.

This one reason alone

suggests you should only use the first eight colours and their highlighted

versions (the next row of the palette).

We are using much more colours than that, also making much more use of

transparency than usual, making it possible

  - to decently see top AND bottom at the same time (and even up to two

    inner layers)

  - with a grid that isn't too prominent, etc.

Attached are two (VERY small) screen shots, the black one rather

old-fashioned (but with more transparency to not let the top nearly hide

the bottom), the white one QUITE unusual, but good even for an office

with LOTS of light. Most of the guys in our institute use the white

colour scheme, because they can see everything on screen properly, even

in high summer.

If you're interested, I can send some bigger screenshots or the

corresponding ULPs to your e-mail address (I don't do this here due to

size restrictions).

Andreas Weidner

Attachments:

Hi Andreas,

This is really cool, could you forward the color scripts to

support@cadsoftusa.com? I'd like to check them out.

Thanks,

Jorge Garcia

CadSoft Guest wrote:

 

Remember that your settings are not recorded in the design so other people

reviewing your design will see their colour settings. This one reason alone

suggests you should only use the first eight colours and their highlighted

versions (the next row of the palette).

I know, but that's no problem, as I normally automatically create images of top and bottom layer (https://github.com/maugsburger/evie), and so far no one ever directly edited the files, at least I didn't see any forks with checkins on github.

Andreas Weidner wrote:

 

If you're interested, I can send some bigger screenshots or the

corresponding ULPs to your e-mail address (I don't do this here due to

size restrictions).

They look very nice, please send the files to moritz(dot)augsburger

Please send me the files to technik(at)stephanlehmann.net.

Hi,

Can you send ULP script to willykaze(at)willykaze.org ?

Cheers.

I followed up on the comments here and pulled together a couple of EagleCAD scripts and menus to make playing with colors easier.

SPCoast.scr is my high level customizations script for various dimensions, menus and the like, with the operative bit being:

MENU 'Settings { SPCoast Colors : script SPCoastcolors.scr; \
               | Eagle Colors : script defaultcolors.scr; \
               | Layers : script SPCoastlayers.scr; \
               | reload SPCoast : script SPCoast.scr; \
               | Black : set palette Black; window; \
               | White : set palette White; window; \
               | Colored : set palette Colored; window; }';

This makes it easy to load updated/different color palettes and/or layer-color mappings and change the palette being used.  Since I mainly play with colors in the board editor, I put this menu in the BRD section; it would work globally as well.

The second script is one to set the layer-color mappings, SPCoastlayers.scr.  These mappings are in each lbr, sch and brd file, and follow your project or library around as you share it with others.  This means that you can have projects that map layers to different colors, even though they all are using the same system-wide palette.

set COLOR_LAYER  1 4;
set COLOR_LAYER 16 2;
set COLOR_LAYER 17 23;
set COLOR_LAYER 18 29;
set COLOR_LAYER 19 6;
... etc ...

If you get a board design from someone else (that has odd colors...), simply run this layers script to reset them to your preferences.

The various levels of color choice indirection in EagleCAD make it hard to follow the connections between a color palette, the layers file, and the actual color being used; it gets worse when several layers all use the same color and you can't tell them apart.

I keep thinking it might be simpler to simply assign each layer to a different color pair (color and color+8, due to the alpha channel stuff) - but I'm not there yet.

The important point with the colors script is to group like things together, so that the color you choose for one works well for the others.  An example is the top copper layer, the top keepout and top restrict layers, which all work well when they share the same base color with different fill patterns.

This takes us to the 3rd script - SPCoastcolors.scr - which is where colors are defined.  It has its roots in the CadSoft defaultcolors.scr script, but has been extended to cover all 3 palettes with "my" set of favorite colors.

This script sets individual palette colors (which end up in $HOME/.eaglerc) for your whole Eagle installation.  Any project you open in EagleCAD on your computer will use the color palettes defined there.

I added - as comments - the layers that went with each palette location, so that I could remember which color showed up where.  This helps considerably when customizing things:

set palette White;
set palette 1 0xB43232C8;
# Bottom, vRestrict
set palette 2 0xB419960E;
# bKeepout, bRestrict
set palette 3 0xD3FC9C38;
# Top, tKeepout, tRestrict
set palette 4 0xB4BF1421;
set palette 5 0xB4C832C8;
# Unrouted set palette 6 0xB4C8C832;
# bValues
# generic grey, bDocu
set palette 7 0xB4C8C8C8;

If you want to use all 3 palettes (black, white and colored), remember that they all use the same layer-to-color mapping, and the alpha blending makes for wildly different color saturations between black, white and beige backgrounds...

For Alpha channel values, I tend use hex(B4) for the odd rows (first, third, ... ) and something larger for the even rows - unless I simply use a more saturated color instead.  Using FF for the alpha of a color means you can't see anything "behind" it, which is annoying.

I got frustrated by not being able to see/use hex values in the Eagle Settings/color picker (and being forced to use hex values in the script); I found it slightly easier to use a 3rd party color picker tool when customizing colors.

Unfortunately, it seems that "nobody else in the known world" has a color picker that puts hex color values with an alpha channel at the beginning, so you can't simply copy/paste from color picker tools into your script without some fiddling.

Worse, none seem to have the ability to set the background for showing the alpha blend, so you can't easily visualize the result (new color alpha blended on black, on white and on colored...) outside of Eagle...

This leads to a managable, but click-intensive workflow cycle as you tune your colors:

start up a text editor on the colors.scr file (once)

menu -> load the layer mapping by running the layers script (once)

repeat:

menu -> load the new colors by running the colors.scr script

pick a layer to tweak, decide if you are happy with it.

if not, spin up a color picker and find a replacement color

copy/paste it into the SPCoastcolors.scr palette location, edit the result to have the right alpha channel bits at the beginning.

save the colors  file

At some point I'll probably write a script  to extract the palette out of an eaglerc file (and the layer info out of a brd file...) into SCRipt files that can be used here; till then, Paul Badger has a good writeup on extracting them by hand.

----

If CadSoft is listening, here's some concrete suggestions:

• colors and layer to color mappings should be in the same place.  Having them split means you can't really share projects and expect them to look the same.
• I'd prefer these settings to be in my $HOME/.eaglerc and not in the sch and brd files, though I could see them optionally being put into the project directory's eagle.epf
• Don't make it hard to keep many projects in sync color-wise by hardcoding these settings in the wrong place!
• The color picker should allow / show hex and decimal values, and use RGB, HSV, greyscale and CYMK sliders
• When selecting a particular color in a palette, show the layers that use it
• Since the layers implicitly tie into all 3 palettes, it would be nice to have a mechanism to see all 3 palettes at once, with the ability to set the 3 color variations for the selected cell at the same time.
• Fix the whole alpha channel mess.  Don't tie them to colors in the palette - define them dynamically as you need to highlight things, layer things and hide things.  If anything, it should be LAYERS that have alpha values, not colors...

Hope this helps someone else out there...

  -John

Thank you so much for your detail comments and your files…

This help a lot.

Benoit

"   If CadSoft is listening, here's some concrete suggestions:

• colors and layer to color mappings should be in the same place.  Having them split means you can't really share projects and expect them to look the same.
• I'd prefer these settings to be in my $HOME/.eaglerc and not in the sch and brd files, though I could see them optionally being put into the project directory's eagle.epf
• Don't make it hard to keep many projects in sync color-wise by hardcoding these settings in the wrong place!
• The color picker should allow / show hex and decimal values, and use RGB, HSV, greyscale and CYMK sliders
• When selecting a particular color in a palette, show the layers that use it
• Since the layers implicitly tie into all 3 palettes, it would be nice to have a mechanism to see all 3 palettes at once, with the ability to set the 3 color variations for the selected cell at the same time.
• Fix the whole alpha channel mess.  Don't tie them to colors in the palette - define them dynamically as you need to highlight things, layer things and hide things.  If anything, it should be LAYERS that have alpha values, not colors...   

If Cadsoft is listening ........      ( One always wonders as the versions come and go and nothing in the interface changes. ) 

An example of excellent and fluid UI for color menu management is the way color palettes are managed in Photoshop.

That kind of fluidity in UI is what you should be aiming for.

Keeping palettes in the scr and brd files has been requested from around five years back.

Load and Save buttons for palettes have been suggested by myself and (probably others). Hey - now the script is done - just put in a button on palette page. (A la Photoshop)

Another suggestion is to be able to edit colors right from the layer palette ( like you can from the Photoshop toolbox).

+1 to the idea of putting the alpha channel on the layers.

If it seems useful it is possible to have two alpha channels one in colors and one in layers, just multiplying them.

Ending the "you can't get there from here" feeling in Eagle would go a long way to making users feel like they're using modern software. Fixing the UI "roadblocks" (aka "you have to do it the Eagle way") would also let users leverage a bit of what they know about how other software packages work.

Paul Badger wrote:

...[snip]...

• Fix the whole alpha channel mess.  Don't tie them to colors in the

palette - define them dynamically as you need to highlight things,

layer things and hide things.  If anything, it should be LAYERS that

have alpha values, not colors...

 

 

 

If Cadsoft is listening ........      ( One always wonders as the

versions come and go and nothing in the interface changes. )

 

An example of excellent and fluid UI for color menu management is the

way color palettes are managed in Photoshop.

That kind of fluidity in UI is what you should be aiming for.

 

Keeping palettes in the scr and brd files has been requested from around

five years back.

Load and Save buttons for palettes have been suggested by myself and

(probably others). Hey - now the script is done - just put in a button

on palette page. (A la Photoshop)

Another suggestion is to be able to edit colors right from the layer

palette ( like you can from the Photoshop toolbox).

+1 to the idea of putting the alpha channel on the layers.

If it seems useful it is possible to have two alpha channels one in

colors and one in layers, just multiplying them.

 

Ending the "you can't get there from here" feeling in Eagle would go a

long way to making users feel like they're using modern software. Fixing

the UI "roadblocks" (aka "you have to do it the Eagle way") would also

let users leverage a bit of what they know about how other software

packages work.

 

--

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http://www.element14.com/community/message/169437

Most of my graphics work on my Linux system is done with Blender--the same

program used by many movie studios. By comparison, the Eagle UI is

simplicity itself. Keep in mind that Eagle is multi-platform, and 'modern'

has a different feel for Mac, Linux, and Windows users.

I do agree with having alpha channels on layers though. I find the current

cross-hatched and dotted approach to coloring multi-layer boards hard to

follow on-screen. A toolbar / editor command for raising and lowering alpha

values by-layer would be nice.

Bob