Sprinternet wrote:

Support

Bright-Idea wrote:

THIS WILL NOT REPLACE THE CURRENT SYSTEM!
What I want is an input bar in the color choice area. Something like this:

This way, you wouldn't have to try to make a color with the slider bar. I think this is much more convenient. I'm not the best artist, but I know a lot of people would benefit from this.

To show my “support” of the Anti-Support Convention, I will not be counting/listing supporters.

Edits

• @LP_Play suggested that there would be a pop-up explaining what this is and how it works when the feature is first used.
  
• Using the color picker tool will auto-update the hex numbers.
  
• THIS WILL NOT REPLACE THE CURRENT SYSTEM!
  
• @Ninchanko made a beautiful explanation. If you don't understand, please read it before posting.
  

10/14/16 - Please mention a pancake in your post, so I know you read the OP.

Ninkancho wrote:

Support. The workaround is tedious to construct, and any colors not already in RGB decimal or HSL must be converted using a site like ColorHexa.com to use them. Opening up the possibility to type color codes in these other existing, important formats would be a very helpful stepping stone for those wanting to go into web development, where eyedropper-style color pickers aren't built into the languages.

Ziggy741 wrote:

Bright-Idea wrote:

Ummm, no. That's what I'm suggesting. The site has a name for a color, like I said, INDIGO. It also has a hexadecimal color code, in this case, the one for INDIGO is #2E0854. There is currently no system to use RGB/Hex codes, so I'm suggesting that this feature be implemented since most other coloring programs (inkscape, Microsoft Paint, etc) have it. If you don't know what RGB/Hex codes are, they're more detailed descriptions of a color, instead of just saying Red, you get a code that tells you what color it is. Do you get it now?

?

In most other programming languages, you can't represent a color as a color swatch, because the languages are text-based. Therefore, many text-based color formats have been devised to represent colors using numbers.

Note also that you can't use the color picker on other tabs or windows, so with the current tools, Scratch (mostly) limits you to imprecise colors.

The Computer Colors Scratch Wiki article is good for reading up on common formats, but I will attempt explain the two formats being discussed in this topic.

RGB stands for Red Green Blue. The pixels that make up a device's screen are usually made of tiny red, green, and blue lights, and RGB colors let you define how bright each light should be, on a scale from 0 to 255. The syntax for this color code is rgb(RRR,GGG,BBB). Scratch does have a workaround for this color format, but it is difficult to understand.

As an example, for a bluish purple in RGB, you could set the red light to half-brightness, the green one to completely off, and blue to full brightness (so it is more blue than red), like this: rgb(128,0,255)

Hex stands for hexadecimal, or base 16. The decimal (base 10) numerical system we're used to uses ten digits, 0 through 9 (0123456789); hexadecimal uses sixteen, 0 through F (0123456789ABCDEF). The result is a numerical system where you can represent numbers 0 to 255 as 0 to FF. Therefore, you can represent any brightness level for a light in only two digits. This means that hex colors are kind of like more abbreviated forms of RGB colors. You currently can't use hexadecimal colors in Scratch at all.

Two digits for three lights means that every hexadecimal color code uses six digits, with a number sign in front to signify that the color is in hexadecimal. The whole code ends up looking like #RRGGBB. 80 is half of 100 (FF+1), so you can represent that same bluish purple from before as #8000FF.

For both of these color formats, you can get different colors by mixing different levels of red, green, and blue. Setting all of the lights to off produces black, while setting them all to full brightness produces white. Other than this, setting red, green, and blue all to the same level (e.g. rgb(128,128,128) or #808080) produces gray. Mixing red and green (e.g. rgb(255,255,0) or #FFFF00) produces yellow. Mixing green and blue produces cyan. Mixing red and blue produces magenta.

I hope you (and anyone else reading this post!) now understand what these color formats are, how they are used, and why they could be useful! If you have any further questions, please try to say specifically what you don't understand, instead of quoting an entire post and typing a few question marks.