colorir 1.1.0

A python package for easy management of colors and palettes.

Note

Please note that colorir is still in its early days and that slight modifications to the API may happen between versions.

What is colorir?

colorir is a package developed to unify your workflow with colors across different projects.

With colorir you can:

• Keep a unified selection of colors you like and use them in your different projects;

• Use these colors directly as input for other graphical or web frameworks;

• Easily convert between different color systems and formats;

• Create gradients between colors and sample from them;

• Pick from hundreds of colors with the built-in color picker;

• And much more!

colorir was designed to be your best friend when dealing with colors so that you won’t ever need to write this kind of code again:

BLACK = (0, 0, 0)
WHITE = (255, 255, 255)
CSS_ALICEBLUE = (240, 248, 255)
COOL_PURPLE = (11, 0, 51)
MY_FAVORITE_GREEN = (113, 180, 141)
TOP_NOTCH_RED = (131, 34, 50)
# ... unnecessarily long and ugly list of colors

Installation

Note

If you encounter permission errors when using colorir, please consider re-installing the package in user mode (by including the --user flag in the pip install command).

To install colorir with pip use following command:

$ python -m pip install colorir

Quick-Start

Create a palette with the additive elementary colors and call it ‘elementary’:

>>> palette = Palette(name="elementary",
...                   red=HexRGB("#ff0000"),
...                   green=HexRGB("00ff00"), # No need to include the # symbol
...                   blue=HexRGB("#0000ff"))

Following CSS color-naming conventions, our color names are all lowercase with no underscores, but you may name a color as you wish as long as it complies with python’s syntax for attribute names.

We can add colors by providing a name and a color-like object to the Palette.add() method:

>>> palette.add("cyan", "#00ffff")
>>> palette.add("yellow", "#ffff00")
>>> palette.add("magenta", HSL(300, 1, 0.5))

Note how we passed hex strings as arguments without initializing HexRGB colors this time. This is because objects that hold colors in the colorir package can interpret strings and tuples as colors implicitly!

We also passed an HSL object for “magenta”. By default, colors passed into a palette are converted to HexRGB, but we will see in a bit how to change this behaviour to work with other color formats.

To then modify a color after it has been added, use the Palette.update() method:

>>> palette.update("magenta", "#ff11ff") # Mix some green component into the magenta

Now suppose we want to finally use the colors we added to our palette. For that we can get them individually as attributes of the palette:

>>> palette.cyan
HexRGB(#00ffff)

Or we can get them all at once with the Palette.colors property:

>>> palette.colors
[HexRGB(#ff0000), HexRGB(#00ff00), HexRGB(#0000ff), HexRGB(#00ffff), HexRGB(#ffff00), \
HexRGB(#ff11ff)]

Since we are done using our palette for now, let’s save it to the default palette directory:

>>> palette.save()

We can then latter load the palette (even from other projects if we wish!):

>>> palette = Palette.load("elementary")

When loading or instantiating a palette, a ColorFormat may be passed to the constructor to specify how we want the color to be represented:

>>> c_format = ColorFormat(color_sys=HSL)
>>> css = Palette.load("css", color_format=c_format)
>>> css.red
HSL(0.0, 1.0, 0.5)

We can also change the format of all colors in a palette at any time by re-assigning its Palette.color_format property:

>>> css.color_format = ColorFormat(color_sys=sRGB, max_rgba=1)
>>> css.red
sRGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0)

Alternatively, we can temporarily change the default color format system-wide so that new palettes (that don’t already hold any color objects) default to it:

>>> from colorir import config, PYGAME_COLOR_FORMAT
>>> config.DEFAULT_COLOR_FORMAT = PYGAME_COLOR_FORMAT # Change default format to PyGame
>>> pygame_palette = Palette(red=(255, 0, 0))
>>> pygame_palette.red
sRGB(255, 0, 0)

This makes it easy to configure colorir to work with any color format right out of the box!

By default, the default color format is lowercase hex strings, like what you expect to find working with web development or matplotlib.

>>> from colorir import config, WEB_COLOR_FORMAT
>>> config.DEFAULT_COLOR_FORMAT = WEB_COLOR_FORMAT # Change default back to web-compatible
>>> web_palette = Palette.load("css")
>>> web_palette.red
HexRGB(#ff0000)

It is worth noting that all color classes inherit either tuple or str, meaning that no conversion is needed when passing them to other frameworks such as PyGame, Kivy and HTML embedding templates like Jinja.

Documentation and Examples

The full documentation (including use-case examples) for colorir is available here.