The design and composition of areas of color and value, especially value, determine the success of a painting or drawing.To my disappointment, no color-picker apps currently available display the gray values of an on-screen image — only the RGB (red, green, blue) values of pixel colors, and this information is practically useless for “real paint” (non-digital) painting purposes.To remedy this situation I wrote and released a grayscale “color-picker” app for Android here on the Play Store last year called "GrayScaler" that displays gray values along with the standard RGB values in an image. This was soon followed by a similar but unpublished app that allowed me to superimpose various sized grids over an image with an optional border mask to crop the image to common canvas shapes — very helpful for accurate drawing of painting subjects.After using these two apps extensively in my own work it very quickly became apparent that it was very inconvenient to load the same image into two separate apps and switch between them, especially if the image was hi-resolution. It was also a terrible waste of sometimes very limited device memory. Since the underlying code for the two apps was substantially the same, having them both running at the same time used up even more memory. Combining them into a single app was obviously a substantial improvement both in convenience and memory usage.In addition to combining the two apps into one, I added some enhancements to the GrayScaler “mode” including display of the CMYK value of the pixel color and fixed a couple of possible sources of reported crashes in the original GrayScaler release. Also new in this version—settings are saved in Shared Preferences.Features Of "GrayScaler" Mode- Load and display jpg and png image files from MediaStore on any device.- Zoom in up to 5X and unlimited pan of image.- Lock and unlock zoom and pan of image.- Display CMYK, RGB and gray values of single pixel or color-averaged 3x3 or 5x5 pixel sample at the touchpoint in a "toast" window.- Info bar at bottom displays most recent sample (because toast window disappears after a few seconds).- Convert any image to 5-levels or 10-levels of gray with easy restoration of the original.Features of Grid Mode- Display grid over image with optional cropping border.- Like "GrayScaler" mode, zoom and pan under the grid both lockable and un-lockable.- Cropping border selection based on range of common canvas sizes.- Number of horizontal grid spaces from 2 to 32.- Grid line color selectable - black or red (for dark images).- NEW! Bind grid to image so that both move and zoom in sync.For more information, a more detailed "How To" description of ArtTools go to https://santhony.com/wordpress/arttools-android-software-for-artists/Be sure to use comments to offer suggestions or report bugs. Thanks!
ArtTools
