pywal vs colorz: repeating color values

[prankousky]

Hi,

I noticed that pywal and colorz produce different values for the same image; when I run wal -i ~/.wp/current.png, it will create a ~/.cache/wal/colors.Xresources file containing this

! X colors.
! Generated by 'wal'
*foreground:        #d3d3d3
*background:        #0e1215
*.foreground:       #d3d3d3
*.background:       #0e1215
emacs*foreground:   #d3d3d3
emacs*background:   #0e1215
URxvt*foreground:   #d3d3d3
XTerm*foreground:   #d3d3d3
UXTerm*foreground:  #d3d3d3
URxvt*color0e1215:   [100]#0e1215
XTerm*background:   #0e1215
UXTerm*background:  #0e1215
URxvt*cursorColor:  #d3d3d3
XTerm*cursorColor:  #d3d3d3
UXTerm*cursorColor: #d3d3d3
URxvt*borderColor:  [100]#0e1215

! Colors 0-15.
*.color0: #0e1215
*color0:  #0e1215
*.color1: #F4E70A
*color1:  #F4E70A
*.color2: #0F7898
*color2:  #0F7898
*.color3: #E30689
*color3:  #E30689
*.color4: #E3678D
*color4:  #E3678D
*.color5: #0F8FAD
*color5:  #0F8FAD
*.color6: #01ABE9
*color6:  #01ABE9
*.color7: #d3d3d3
*color7:  #d3d3d3
*.color8: #939393
*color8:  #939393
*.color9: #F4E70A
*color9:  #F4E70A
*.color10: #0F7898
*color10:  #0F7898
*.color11: #E30689
*color11:  #E30689
*.color12: #E3678D
*color12:  #E3678D
*.color13: #0F8FAD
*color13:  #0F8FAD
*.color14: #01ABE9
*color14:  #01ABE9
*.color15: #d3d3d3
*color15:  #d3d3d3

! Black color that will not be affected by bold highlighting.
*.color66: #0e1215
*color66:  #0e1215

! Xclock colors.
XClock*foreground: #d3d3d3
XClock*background: #0e1215
XClock*majorColor:  rgba:d3/d3/d3/ff
XClock*minorColor:  rgba:d3/d3/d3/ff
XClock*hourColor:   rgba:d3/d3/d3/ff
XClock*minuteColor: rgba:d3/d3/d3/ff
XClock*secondColor: rgba:d3/d3/d3/ff

! Set depth to make transparency work.
URxvt*depth: 32

Here, color0/color9, color1/color10, color2/color11 etc. are a always the same color!

When I run colorz ~/.wp/current.png, the color palette looks a bit different

(sorry for the crappy screenshot, there is something wrong with my script)

These colors are always similar, but not exactly the same.

Am I doing something wrong, or do I have to finetune paywal more? Thank you for your ideas :)

[dylanaraps]

Yes. pywal has multiple backends for color generation and the default is imagemagick (not colorz). Use --backend colorz. 👍

[prankousky]

Thank you @dylanaraps

When I use --backend colorz, I still get the same value for color1/color9 etc.; in other words, instead of 16 colors, I only get 8 colors that are the same value for dark and light. Is there another option I can use to fix this?

I used the same image as before, and colorz will generate those slightly different colors when used on its own, but not when used as --backend.

[billbrod]

I noticed the same thing. No matter which backend I use, pywal only gives me 9 colors: all of color0 through color8 are unique, then color9 is a repeat of color1, and so on through color15

I poked around in pywal/backends/colorz.py, and on line 22 it calls raw_colors = colorz.colorz(img, n=6, bold_add=0). raw_colors is a list with 6 elements, each of which contains a 2-tuple with 2 RGB triplets: the first triplet is the "darker" version of the color, the second is the "brighter" one. By setting bold_add=0, pywal makes sure that the two triplets are identical, but if you use the default value of 50, you get what @prankousky showed in their screenshot above. pywal then converts only the first triplet to hex codes, so you end up with a list of 6 hex codes. The adjust function, on line 26, then repeats this list to get the full 16 colors, then calls pywal.colors.generic_adjust to do some small adjustment of the lightness / darkness of color7 and color8.

Is there a reason why pywal does this duplication instead of using all the values colorz returns? And why it uses bold_add=0?

I haven't checked the other backends, but I assume something similar is going on.

This is all with wal 3.3.0

[billbrod]

If I make some small changes, I can get the two separate bold values, like colorz returns by default:

original pywal/backends/colorz.py:

"""
Generate a colorscheme using Colorz.
"""
import logging
import sys

try:
    import colorz

except ImportError:
    logging.error("colorz wasn't found on your system.")
    logging.error("Try another backend. (wal --backend)")
    sys.exit(1)

from .. import colors
from .. import util


def gen_colors(img):
    """Generate a colorscheme using Colorz."""
    raw_colors = colorz.colorz(img, n=6, bold_add=0)
    return [util.rgb_to_hex([*color[0]]) for color in raw_colors]


def adjust(cols, light):
    """Create palette."""
    raw_colors = [cols[0], *cols, "#FFFFFF",
                  "#000000", *cols, "#FFFFFF"]
    return colors.generic_adjust(raw_colors, light)


def get(img, light=False):
    """Get colorscheme."""
    cols = gen_colors(img)

    if len(cols) < 6:
        logging.error("colorz failed to generate enough colors.")
        logging.error("Try another backend or another image. (wal --backend)")
        sys.exit(1)

    return adjust(cols, light)

modified version (the differences are in the value of bold_add, what gen_colors() returns and how adjusts() creates raw_colors from cols):

"""
Generate a colorscheme using Colorz.
"""
import logging
import sys

try:
    import colorz

except ImportError:
    logging.error("colorz wasn't found on your system.")
    logging.error("Try another backend. (wal --backend)")
    sys.exit(1)

from .. import colors
from .. import util


def gen_colors(img):
    """Generate a colorscheme using Colorz."""
    # pylint: disable=not-callable
    raw_colors = colorz.colorz(img, n=6, bold_add=50)
    return ([util.rgb_to_hex([*color[0]]) for color in raw_colors] +
            [util.rgb_to_hex([*color[1]]) for color in raw_colors])


def adjust(cols, light):
    """Create palette."""
    raw_colors = [cols[0], *cols[:6], "#FFFFFF",
                  "#000000", *cols[6:], "#FFFFFF"]
    return colors.generic_adjust(raw_colors, light)


def get(img, light=False):
    """Get colorscheme."""
    cols = gen_colors(img)

    if len(cols) < 6:
        logging.error("colorz failed to generate enough colors.")
        logging.error("Try another backend or another image. (wal --backend)")
        sys.exit(1)

    return adjust(cols, light)

[prankousky]

This is great! @dylanaraps would it be possible to integrate the solution @billbrod found into pywal?

[sonjiku]

I made a pull request of my fix. Check #601, it makes all the backends generate 16 colors. The first 8 are a darker shade of the latter 8.