Blackmagic Forum

A quick one. When i am clicking in the color box - to change the background color in Fusion- I get the Apple color window not the Blackmagic one. I've tried to check the Resolve Preferences and the Fusion Setting but I don't seem to find a way. Maybe somebody can help.

moved to Resolve forum

Same here.

They use the default one from Qt which has OS specific appearance as far as I know, under Win it isn't some special BMD picker either, it is the regular QColorDialog: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qcolordialog.html

In Fusion you can click the little twirl icon to use an in-Inspector colour picker. I usually prefer that option to bringing up the full OS colour picker.

Thank you Tom and all, but still would like to now about the BM color window as in the attached pic. How can i get that to show vs the Apple one? Is it possible on a Mac?

I have NEVER seen that colour picker window on Mac. How did you display it in Resolve?
Also, why do you need it?

Peter Cave wrote:I have NEVER seen that colour picker window on Mac. How did you display it in Resolve?
Also, why do you need it?

I believe that's the one in Fusion.

zingaro wrote:Thank you Tom and all, but still would like to now about the BM color window as in the attached pic. How can i get that to show vs the Apple one? Is it possible on a Mac?

That's not the "Blackmagic one" - it's the QT colour picker that's provided on Windows only. Based on the Windows colour picker (as seen in Paint for example), but with the addition of the HEX value picker.

There is no way to get that on Mac.

When you click to choose a colour in Fusion you will get this on macOS:

Or this on Windows:


There is no way to get the other one. Short of changing your operating system, of course

But do remember that the macOS colour picker has multiple tabs with various different colour picking options:


So if you're looking to enter RGB / HEX values, the second tab along can give you this:


The macOS colour picker actually has quite a few more options than the Windows/QT one. It's just they're spread out amongst multiple tabs, so you have to click around more to see the options versus on Windows.

Not that it matters to user, but it isn't Windows picker, it is from Qt toolkit. Difference is in the hex value knob which Win picker does not have, otherwise they look very similar. It might be important to the topic though, because this picker could possibly be used under Mac too. There is a setting that force-disables native picker: QColorDialog::DontUseNativeDialog

Oh yeah, my mistake. I looked at the one in Paint but only glanced quickly and thought it was identical:


I missed the addition of the Hex value in the QT one. I'll edit to make that clear, thanks.

Hendrik Proosa wrote:It might be important to the topic though, because this picker could possibly be used under Mac too. There is a setting that force-disables native picker: QColorDialog::DontUseNativeDialog

Oh that's interesting. I scoured the Fusion Studio options as if there was an option anywhere, it'd be there. But there's not.

Is there any way to specify that option at runtime - environment variable or such? Or can it only be chosen by the developer?

By the way, for the OP, you can see the official word on this in the Fusion section of the Resolve manual, which differentiates between the "macOS Colors panel" and "Windows Color dialog" (though Hendrik says the latter is actually the QT dialogue):

Don't take my word on it, but not sure there is a way to change this from user side, because it is a Qt enum for setting this parameter for one specific colorpicker. It is possible to change it on runtime though, so could be turned into a preference setting for Resolve/Fusion. If there were a way to drill down to this specific picker through python, it might be possible to change it by user too, but I don't know if it is possible. It might be, because if you get a handle on one Qt object in Resovle/Fu you can probably walk the object hierarchy and search for the picker.

OK thanks for the details.

Personally I think the macOS colour picker is actually better than the Windows/QT one. At least, it provides more options in total. The Windows/QT one is perhaps more convenient as it shows everything in one window; you don't have to click around tabs.

But if you need more control, the macOS one has quite a few options, including the ability to select values for different colour spaces:


I don't know if in practice that's ever going to be important in Fusion specifically, where one should normally be working in linear only, but it's there if it's needed.

Selecting colors in different colorspace as a process by itself makes no sense to me, because values don't have colorspace. At best it would convert input values in colorspace x (what was set from that menu) to values in colorspace y (what was selected afterwards). Not sure how it works there, I'm not a mac user.

PS. "linear" is not a colorspace. Unless you attach a gamut to it, "linear" is meaningless.

Peter Cave wrote:I have NEVER seen that colour picker window on Mac. How did you display it in Resolve?
Also, why do you need it?

I saw this popping up in a Fusion tutorial - where the Hex value was just typed in to change the background color- and erroneously thought it was a native BM color picker because of the logo on the top left. Just digging in if it was an available option I was not aware of.

TheBloke wrote:By the way, for the OP, you can see the official word on this in the Fusion section of the Resolve manual, which differentiates between the "macOS Colors panel" and "Windows Color dialog" (though Hendrik says the latter is actually the QT dialogue):

Thanks, it is just right there.... there is indeed no mention of a Blackmagic color picker)

Thank you Hendrick and Tom for elaborating and helpful info!