Dr. Woohoo!

Celeste Motus, II movimento from dottore on Vimeo.

Continuing on my quest to rid the world of ugly color palettes, I have created a couple of new color palette options – leveraging Adobe Illustrator’s color tools, Kuler and In The Mod: Color Analytic applications – for openFrameworks (OF) and vvvv artists/developers. The incredibly talented defetto (check out his new site at abstractbirds.com) helped push me and developed the vvvv Patches and I received excellent beta testing support from vadim.

There are two types of colors tools that I will share with you: 1) Scripts that run within Illustrator and 2) several stand-alone applications, both of which export the color palettes as XML files in a format that’s compatible with OF and vvvv.

Kuler > Illustrator CS4 > openFrameworks
Illustrator has some incredible tools for editing color palettes as individuals or in groups. Simply create a color group, drop some color swatches in that group and double click it to explore all of your editing options (and/or check out Adobe’s online help for editing colors here). What most people may not realize is that via an ExtendScript – Adobe’s enhanced version of Javascript – can automatically determine how many colors and groups there are in a Swatches Panel and then make additions, changes, deletions or simply retrieve more information about each swatch, e.g., what the RGB values are of each swatch. Combined with the ability to read and write files, we can easily import and export colors to / from whatever formats we want. Unfortunately if we tried this in Photoshop, we would fail because our script wouldn’t be able to tell us how many swatches we have due to self-imposed limitations from Adobe [ I love you guys but come on, I've begged for this for how many years? ].

In the following video, I will walk you through the process of installing the ExtendScript, selecting a group of colors from the Kuler extension in Illlustrator, exporting them and importing them into openFrameworks.

Kuler > Illustrator > openFrameworks from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

This tutorial was built on a Mac using Adobe Illustrator CS4, Xcode and the fat version of openFrameworks v006 with the following addons (ofxTuio, ofxMSAFluid, ofxMSAInteractiveObject, ofxXmlSettings and ofxSimpleGuiToo).

1. ofxMSAFluid
for the kuler > AI > OF integration, as i mentioned previously, i’m using memo’s sweet ofxMSAFluid. the first thing you’ll want to do is follow memo’s instructions on downloading the OF addons for ofxMSAFluid here: memo.tv/ofxmsafluid. once you can build and run that project proceed to the next step.

2. kuler + ai magic
download and unzip the OF and the AI script from here: drwoohoo.com/downloads/Kuler_AI_OF.zip.

3. after completing steps 1 + 2, watch the video again if need be… the script + OF code will make more sense at that point.

Kuler > Adobe Illustrator CS4 > vvvv
For vvvv lovers, download the script that I wrote and vvvv Patches via defetto from here and follow the same process as described in the video up to ~4:30. Further instructions can be found in the download in the ReadMe-Kuler 2 vvvv.pdf.

ITM: Your Images and ITM: Webcam > openFrameworks
As previously mentioned, the second set of color tools for openFrameworks involves two stand-alone applications. The first, In The Mod: Your Images allows you to drag-n-drop images from your computer onto the application which then extrapolates the colors, analyzes and visualizes them and enables you to save then either directly to Illustrator or Photoshop or as XML files for Processing, openFrameworks or vvvv. In The Mod: Webcam supports the color functionality, however it lets you quickly capture colors via the video streaming in from your Webcam.

How do you save the colors from ITM: Your Images or ITM: Webcam to use in vvvv?
After selecting a palette, click on the vvvv icon (it’s black with white copy and says ‘vvvv’ on it), fifth to the left in the bottom-right corner of the application. A save dialog window will open. Select the location you would like to save it.

How do you import the colors into vvvv?
To import the XML color palette (as an xml file that includes the following variables: red, green, blue, frequency, relative frequency, and cumulative relative frequency) into vvvv you will need the following:

1) The latest version of vvvv
2) Download the vvvv Patches from here. Read the file ReadMe-In The Mod 2 vvvv.pdf for step-by-step instructions. As a bonus, there is an Illustrator script and set of instructions (ReadMe-Kuler 2 vvvv.pdf) on how to export color palettes directly from Illustrator.