Apply palette to image

[arunoruto]

Generating a palette from an image reminded me of when I was using Arch and pywal to rice my system, and back then, I loved it. Nowadays, I am a simple man, and I am running Gruvbox since it gives nice colors for the UI and in my editor of choice (Helix). But I am still aching for a matching wallpaper, and I am not the only one with the problem: I have a nice wallpaper (image-wise) and a color scheme I prefer/love, but neither matches.

Generating a palette from the image is one way to solve it, but doing so can negatively impact readability or UI elements in specific programs. People take their time to design a color palette so the end-user has a pleasant experience using it.
On the other hand, when we pick an image, it is usually, but not always, because of its elements. And even if it is about the colors, we can sometimes make a trade-off by slightly changing them, and it still packs that punch we initially saw.

I came across gruvbox-factory, which was made specifically for applying the Gruvbox color palette to an image but can be easily extended to support any palette. This is also what I am currently rocking on my setup. I applied the change to my most used wallpapers, and it looks amazing!

I wanted to see if someone else is also interested in this and if gruvbox-factory could be extended/modified to our needs. The end goal would be to have flags like applySchemeToImage and extractSchemeFromImage, with the first applying the described feature to the image, and the second one extracting the palette from the image, like it is done now! (if none are set, the image and palette are applied separately)

What are your thoughts on this?

[Flameopathic]

see #473

i'd love this, i'm sad that #477 is closed for now.

[danth]

It's possible to do this by setting something like

{ pkgs, ... }:

{
  base16Scheme = ...;

  image = pkgs.runCommand "wallpaper.png" {} ''
    gruvbox-factory ... $out ...
  '';
}

[OriginalJohann]

I put this at the top of my homemanager file:

... }: let
  theme = "${pkgs.base16-schemes}/share/themes/windows-highcontrast.yaml";
  wallpaper = pkgs.runCommand "wallpaper.png" {} ''
    COLOR1=$(${pkgs.yq}/bin/yq -r .palette.base00 ${theme})
    COLOR2=$(${pkgs.yq}/bin/yq -r .palette.base07 ${theme})
    ${pkgs.imagemagick}/bin/magick ${../files/wallpapers/background01.jpg} +level-colors $COLOR1,$COLOR2 $out
  '';
in { ...

I chose these colors because in most (if not all) themes, there would be alot of grey colors in the later "slots". I had to adjust the code a little bit after switching over to nix-unstable. Try to fiddle around with magick (imagemagick) if the above code does not work.

Edit: Isn't Stylix already able to get a theme from the chosen background image?

[trueNAHO]

Isn't Stylix already able to get a theme from the chosen background image?

Yes. However, the purpose of this functionality is to apply a given theme to the background image. For example, if the background image is mostly blue and the provided color scheme is orange, it would be nice if the background image would be recolored to match the color scheme.

The current plans are to leverage this functionality to implement slideshows:

• (6) Implement slideshow with post-processing capabilities
  • stylix: support slideshows and animated wallpapers #63
  • treewide: implement image editor #477 (comment)
  • treewide: implement image editor #477 (comment)

-- Roadmap

[OriginalJohann]

As stated: My snipped does just that. It's not a function in Stylix but it works with the concept of base16 themes :) It's important to hit the "defining" of the 16 colors for tinting the image.

I was asking because OP talked about "extractFromImage".

[arunoruto]

I was asking because OP talked about "extractFromImage".

It is a functionality that stylix already has, and it was usually enforced (I think it can be disabled now, if a specific theme is used). It was just a hypothetical attribute to be set, so the feature is triggered when the wallpaper is changed. The two hypothetical attributes extractSchemeFromImage and applySchemeToImage would either extract the scheme from the chosen image (the functionality that is already present) or apply the colors scheme to the chosen image, so it fits better (something like you described above with magick). I would love for the scheme application to be automatic and less fiddling around, so the user doesn't have to do much in that regard. Something along the lines of a clustering algorithm and assigning the closest neighbour, but there is probably something more simple/sophisticated!