I built an Interactive Color Picker Control for Xamarin.Forms!

Let me share my adventure of building an awesome interactive and responsive Color Picker UI Control for Xamarin.Forms with the help of a little SkiaSharp magic! 😉

To blow your mind, imagine something similar to the Color Picker your have in Ms Paint, HTML Web Color Picker or Google Search Web Color Picker…

Think of how interactive and fun to use those UI Elements are, with their drag and drop pointers on the color spectrum which picks up the color from wherever you drop it.

Why can’t we have the same easy to use fun interactive experience in our Xamarin.Forms apps?

Color Picker control is something that’s missing out of the box in Xamarin.Forms, even when it comes to 3rd party controls out there, neither of them are interactive or responsive, let along any fun to use all. lol 😀

Backstory…

Some time back, I ventured in a project where it required me to build a Color Picking UI element, where it would be easy to use for the user to have a similar experience to what we have with Ms Paint, or Web Color Picker UI elements. So I started off by looking at existing 3rd party library controls out there, which ended up me being disappointed seeing all the controls are just static boring color selection lists of grid style elements.

So I started building my own interactive fun-to-use Color Picker from scratch modeled after the Color Picker UI controls we have in Ms Paint, HTML Web Color Picker, etc… The awesomeness of this would allow you to touch, swipe and pan across a beautiful spectrum of color scheme and pick the color you desire! 😀

So… What?

So what we really need to build in this case is, create a Canvas with a full Color spectrum similar to a rainbow gradient effect spreading across, while allowing the User to touch at any given pixel point, up on which an event will trigger capturing the Color value of that pixel point. Also we should be able to highlight that touch triggered pixel point, giving the feedback to the User.

How? in a Gist…

Frankly this is not possible at all, out of the box in Xamarin.Forms, but with the help of a little SkiaSharp magic, this would be possible! SkiaSharp is the awesome 2D graphics rendering library that let’s you do all kinds of cool stuff on top of Xamarin.Forms. So basically we’re going to draw the full Color spectrum with a rainbow-gradient style spreading across a 2D canvas with the help of SkiaSharp.

We will define the list of main colors we need to include across the Canvas, while defining the Gradient fading effect between them. Then with regards to Touch, we need to enable this on the SkiaSharp canvas, and subscribe to the touch handling events.

Then given the User triggers a touch even on the Canvas, we will pick up those coordinate values on the canvas, and pick the Color values of the Pixel at that point on the Canvas. Voiala! We got the Color value picked by the User! 😉 Then as a responsive feedback we will draw highlighting circle around that pixel point coordinates on the Canvas. 😀

Well there you have it, quite straight forward eh! 😉

Sneak Peak!

Just to give a little sneak peak, here’s what I build… 😀 Behold the Interactive Color Picker Control for Xamarin.Forms!

Pretty awesome eh! Xamarin.Forms + SkiaSharp magic! 😉

Project hosted on github:  
https://github.com/UdaraAlwis/XFColorPickerControl 

Alright then let me show you how I built it…

Let’s start building!

Let’s begin by adding SkiaSharp to our Xamarin.Forms project. Open up Nuget Package Manager on your Xamarin.Forms solution node and add SkiaSharp.View.Forms Nuget to your .NET Standard project node and platform nodes as shown below…

That’s it, no extra set up is needed… 😉

Next we need to create our Custom Control, which I’m going to name as ColorPickerControl!

The ColorPickerControl!

It’s better to keep this in a dedicated folder in the .NET Standard project, inside a “Controls” folder, for the sake of clarity! 😉 So let’s create our ColorPickerControl as a type ContentView XAML element in the Controls folder…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ContentView
    x:Class="XFColorPickerControl.Controls.ColorPickerControl"
    xmlns="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2009/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://xamarin.com/schemas/2014/forms/design"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d">

    <!-- Content of the Control -->

</ContentView>

Then as of the code behind, let’s set up a PickedColor Property that holds the value of the Color that User picks during the run time, and an event that fires itself up on that action, PickedColorChanged event!

[XamlCompilation(XamlCompilationOptions.Compile)]
public partial class ColorPickerControl : ContentView
{
	public event EventHandler<Color> PickedColorChanged;

	public static readonly BindableProperty PickedColorProperty
		= BindableProperty.Create(
			nameof(PickedColor),
			typeof(Color),
			typeof(ColorPickerControl));

	public Color PickedColor
	{
		get { return (Color)GetValue(PickedColorProperty); }
		set { SetValue(PickedColorProperty, value); }
	}

	public ColorPickerControl()
	{
		InitializeComponent();
	}
}

Alright next on to setting up the SkiaSharp bits in our Control…

The SkiaSharp magic!

SkiaSharp’s magical Canvas called SKCanvasView is what we’re going to use to Draw our Rainbow Color Spectrum and handle all the Touch event bits… So let’s begin by adding the SKCanvasView to our ColorPickerControl XAML and also the SkiaSharp.Views.Forms reference in the XAML itself..

<ContentView
    ...
    xmlns:skia="clr-namespace:SkiaSharp.Views.Forms;assembly=SkiaSharp.Views.Forms"
	...
	>

    <skia:SKCanvasView
        x:Name="SkCanvasView"
        EnableTouchEvents="True"
        PaintSurface="SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface"
        Touch="SkCanvasView_OnTouch" />

</ContentView>

Code on Github: /XFColorPickerControl/Controls/ColorPickerControl.xaml

As you can see on my SKCanvasView element, I have enabled touch events with EnableTouchEvents property and subscribed to Touch event with SkCanvasView_OnTouch. Subscribing to PaintSurface allows us to draw full blown 2D graphics on the Canvas, which is why we have created the event SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface event.

So let’s handle all those events in the code behind of our ColorPickerControl…

[XamlCompilation(XamlCompilationOptions.Compile)]
public partial class ColorPickerControl : ContentView
{
	...
	
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
                      (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs e)
	{
		var skImageInfo = e.Info;
		var skSurface = e.Surface;
		var skCanvas = skSurface.Canvas;

		var skCanvasWidth = skImageInfo.Width;
		var skCanvasHeight = skImageInfo.Height;

		skCanvas.Clear(SKColors.White);

		...
	}
	
	private void SkCanvasView_OnTouch
                      (object sender, SKTouchEventArgs e)
	{
		...
	}
}

Code on Github: /XFColorPickerControl/Controls/ColorPickerControl.xaml.cs

So we’re setting up the basic values we need to use inside SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface with the skImageInfo, skSurface, skCanvas, which will be very useful in our next set of code snippets!

This is where our core implementation is going to be taking place, let me get into details of each code snippet one by one, but you can always go back to the full code on github and take a look by yourself… 😉 Let’s continue…

The Touch!

Let me begin diving in with the SkCanvasView_OnTouch event method implementation, which handles the touch events occurs on the SkiaSharp Canvas we added into our Control.

We need to keep a track on each Touch event that occurs, so we will store that in a local variable _lastTouchPoint which is of type SKPoint. Since we need to only consider the touch events that occur inside the canvas region, we’re validating each touch coordinate (X,Y) that comes into the event.

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnTouch
	               (object sender, SKTouchEventArgs e)
	{
		_lastTouchPoint = e.Location;

		var canvasSize = SkCanvasView.CanvasSize;

		// Check for each touch point XY position to be inside Canvas
		// Ignore any Touch event ocurred outside the Canvas region 
		if ((e.Location.X > 0 && e.Location.X < canvasSize.Width) &&
			(e.Location.Y > 0 && e.Location.Y < canvasSize.Height))
		{
			e.Handled = true;

			// update the Canvas as you wish
			SkCanvasView.InvalidateSurface();
		}
	}
...

Based on the validated touch event coordinate, we’re firing up the SkiaSharp Canvas drawing cycle, SkCanvasView.InvalidateSurface(), where we will handle, picking up the color on the touch point and redrawing the canvas to highlight the touch point coordinates on the Canvas.

The Rainbow Color Spectrum!

So this right here is the most critical functionality that we need to implement, drawing the beautiful rainbow gradient color spectrum on our SkiaSharp Canvas. We’re going to draw the following list of colors across the spectrum, which values I picked up with the help of Google Web Color Picker..

Red | Yellow | Green (Lime) | Aqua | Blue | Fuchsia | Red

This will take place in our SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface event method that we created in the previous step, where we create the Paint object that’s going to draw the color spectrum on the Canvas, along with the gradient fading effect between all the colors using SKShader object.

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
	               (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs  e)
	{
		// Draw gradient rainbow Color spectrum
		using (var paint = new SKPaint())
		{
			paint.IsAntialias = true;

			// Initiate the primary Color list
			// picked up from Google Web Color Picker
			var colors = new SKColor[]
			{
				new SKColor(255, 0, 0), // Red
				new SKColor(255, 255, 0), // Yellow
				new SKColor(0, 255, 0), // Green (Lime)
				new SKColor(0, 255, 255), // Aqua
				new SKColor(0, 0, 255), // Blue
				new SKColor(255, 0, 255), // Fuchsia
				new SKColor(255, 0, 0), // Red
			};

			// create the gradient shader between Colors
			using (var shader = SKShader.CreateLinearGradient(
				new SKPoint(0, 0),
				new SKPoint(skCanvasWidth, 0),
				colors,
				null,
				SKShaderTileMode.Clamp))
			{
				paint.Shader = shader;
				skCanvas.DrawPaint(paint);
			}
		}
	}
...

As you can see we are defining the list of Colors with SKColor objects, that’ll populate the rainbow color spectrum on our Canvas. Then we use SKShader.CreateLinearGradient() method to build the gradient shader using the list of colors, and then we draw it on the Canvas using skCanvas.DrawPaint().

Keep a note how SKPoint() objects define the starting and ending coordinates on the Canvas which the shader will spread through, thus we’re taking skCanvasWidth picking the corner most value on the X axis. 😉

The Darker Gradient Strip!

Next we need to draw the darker shadow gradient strip on the Canvas allowing Users to pick the Darker Colors of the primary colors we defined.

We’re going to paint the darker color regions by drawing another layer on top of the previous drawn layer creating the illusion of darker regions of each color.

This will take place in our SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface but below the code snippet that I showed before. Very much similar to the previous snippet, we’re doing almost the same thing but adding a darker gradient region at the bottom of the Canvas.

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
	               (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs  e)
	{
		...
		
		// Draw darker gradient spectrum
		using (var paint = new SKPaint())
		{
			paint.IsAntialias = true;

			// Initiate the darkened primary color list
			var colors = new SKColor[]
			{
				SKColors.Transparent,
				SKColors.Black
			};

			// create the gradient shader 
			using (var shader = SKShader.CreateLinearGradient(
				new SKPoint(0, 0),
				new SKPoint(0, skCanvasHeight),
				colors,
				null,
				SKShaderTileMode.Clamp))
			{
				paint.Shader = shader;
				skCanvas.DrawPaint(paint);
			}
		}
	}
...

Here we’re drawing the darkening gradient layer starting from Transparent color to Black color across the Y axis, thus we’re taking skCanvasHeight picking the corner most value on the Y axis similar to what we did before. 😉

Here they are side by side, before and after drawing darker gradient strip… 😀

The Lighter Gradient Strip!?

This this is bit of an extra cherry on top, as you may have seen some of those Color Pickers include picking Lighter versions of the Colors. We can easily do this by adding a White color object to the list of colors in the code snippet I shared above.

...         
	...
		 ...
			// Initiate the darkened primary color list
			var colors = new SKColor[]
			{
				SKColors.White,
				SKColors.Transparent,
				SKColors.Black
			};  
		 ...
	...
...	

This will draw the secondary layer with White | Transparent | Black gradient effects on top of the full color spectrum layer.

There you go, with the Lighter color gradient strip. Although I wouldn’t include this in my demo app code 😛 Just coz I don’t like it! lol

Picking the Color on Touch!

This is the most crucial bit of this Control, also the most time consuming implementation I had to go through during my trial and error experimentation to get this working! 😮

We are going to be using the _lastTouchPoint SKPoint object, that we created before, in order to access the coordinate data of the touch point on Canvas. Then we look for extract the pixel color values on that coordinate on the Canvas, given that the Canvas is already rendered with the Color spectrum.

This will take place in our SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface event method, below the color spectrum drawing code snippet.

Experimentation Phase…

Picking a pixel on the rendered Canvas layer is not a straight forward task, the idea here is to capture a quick snapshot of the Canvas graphic layer and convert that into a bitmap image, and use that image to pick the pixels from using the touch coordinates.

As you can see from below, the first implementation I put together which captures a snapshot of the Canvas surface layer and load it into a SKBitmap image, then I retrieve the Pixel data on that image using bitmap.GetPixel() by passing in the touch point values.

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
				   (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs  e)
	{
		...
		
		// Picking the Pixel Color values on the Touch Point

		// Represent the color of the current Touch point
		SKColor touchPointColor;

		//// Inefficient: causes memory overload errors
		//using (var skImage = skSurface.Snapshot())
		//{
		//	using (var skData = skImage.Encode(SKEncodedImageFormat.Webp, 100))
		//	{
		//		if (skData != null)
		//		{
		//			using (SKBitmap bitmap = SKBitmap.Decode(skData))
		//			{
		//				touchPointColor = bitmap.GetPixel(
		//									(int)_lastTouchPoint.X, (int)_lastTouchPoint.Y);
		//			}
		//		}
		//	}
		//}
		
		...
	}
...

Later it started causing performance issues due to calling Snapshot() method during each rendering cycle, which is a very heavy process, and even sometimes overloads the memory.

Better Solution…

So after a bit more exploration with trial and error, I managed to build a solution based on a Xamarin Forum response that I found to a similar requirement I had…
https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/92899/read-a-pixel-info-from-a-canvas

What if instead of taking a snapshot, we use SKImageInfo object of the Canvas instance and extract a SKBitmap image and read the pixel color data of the touch point coordinates. This is way more efficient and consumes much less memory for execution… 😉

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
				   (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs  e)
	{
		...
		
		// Picking the Pixel Color values on the Touch Point

		// Represent the color of the current Touch point
		SKColor touchPointColor;

		// Efficient and fast
		// https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/92899/read-a-pixel-info-from-a-canvas
		// create the 1x1 bitmap (auto allocates the pixel buffer)
		using (SKBitmap bitmap = new SKBitmap(skImageInfo))
		{
			// get the pixel buffer for the bitmap
			IntPtr dstpixels = bitmap.GetPixels();

			// read the surface into the bitmap
			skSurface.ReadPixels(skImageInfo,
				dstpixels,
				skImageInfo.RowBytes,
				(int)_lastTouchPoint.X, (int)_lastTouchPoint.Y);

			// access the color
			touchPointColor = bitmap.GetPixel(0, 0);
		}
		
		...
	}
...

As you can see we’re using skSurface.ReadPixels() to load the pixel data on the coordinates, and finally loading the exact pixel data into touchPointColor as a SKColor object type. 😀

So now we picked the Color from a given touch point on the Canvas, let’s move to the next bit…

The Touch Feedback!

This is the part where we provide on touch feedback for the User by highlighting the touch point on the Canvas up on each touch event. As you noticed we’re firing up the OnPaintSurface event upon each touch event of the Canvas, hence we can draw the highlighting region on the Canvas right here as a feedback loop.

We’re simply going to create a SKPaint object, with White color and use skCanvas.DrawCircle() to draw a circle around the touch point coordinates on the Canvas. Then as an added extra, I’m drawing another circle on top of it with the picked color, so that we can emphasize on the pixel color of the touch point. 😉

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
				   (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs  e)
	{
		...
		
		// Painting the Touch point
		using (SKPaint paintTouchPoint = new SKPaint())
		{
			paintTouchPoint.Style = SKPaintStyle.Fill;
			paintTouchPoint.Color = SKColors.White;
			paintTouchPoint.IsAntialias = true;

			// Outer circle (Ring)
			var outerRingRadius = 
				((float)skCanvasWidth/
                    (float)skCanvasHeight) * (float)18;
			skCanvas.DrawCircle(
				_lastTouchPoint.X,
				_lastTouchPoint.Y,
				outerRingRadius, paintTouchPoint);

			// Draw another circle with picked color
			paintTouchPoint.Color = touchPointColor;

			// Outer circle (Ring)
			var innerRingRadius = 
				((float)skCanvasWidth/
                    (float)skCanvasHeight) * (float)12;
			skCanvas.DrawCircle(
				_lastTouchPoint.X,
				_lastTouchPoint.Y,
				innerRingRadius, paintTouchPoint);
		}
		
		...
	}
...

As you can see _lastTouchPoint X and Y coordinates to draw the circle, and we’re calculating the radius value for both circles by adjacent to Canvas width and height, so it renders nicely on any device scale.

And then to the final step, returning back the Color that we Picked from our ColorPickerControl!

Return the Picked Color!

Now we need to return back the Color value that the User picked, to the subscribers or whoever’s listening to the PickedColor property and PickedColorChanged event.

...
	private void SkCanvasView_OnPaintSurface
				   (object sender, SKPaintSurfaceEventArgs  e)
	{
		...
		
		// Set selected color
		PickedColor = touchPointColor.ToFormsColor();
		PickedColorChanged?.Invoke(this, PickedColor);
		
		...
	}
...

It’s as simple as setting the Value and firing up the Event with the new Color value parameter…

Alright, that’s it! We’ve finished building our awesome ColorPickerControl! 😀

Let’s try it out!

Since we created it as a standalone UI Control you can use this little awesomeness anywhere in your Xamarin.Forms project as you would with any UI element as easy as below…

<controls:ColorPickerControl 
	x:Name="ColorPicker"
	PickedColorChanged="ColorPicker_PickedColorChanged" />

So let’s try adding this to a ContentPage with a nice little Frame element around it with a fixed Height and Width…

<Frame
	x:Name="ColorPickerFrame"
	CornerRadius="8"
	HeightRequest="200"
	HorizontalOptions="Center"
	WidthRequest="350">
	<controls:ColorPickerControl 
		x:Name="ColorPicker"
		PickedColorChanged="ColorPicker_PickedColorChanged" />
</Frame>

This will give a nice little frame around the Color picker control, then on to the code behind…

private void ColorPicker_PickedColorChanged
			(object sender, Color colorPicked)
{
	ColorPickerHolderFrame.BackgroundColor = colorPicked;
}

PickedColorChanged provide you the picked Color value, so you can do what you wish with it!

Fire it up!

Time to fire it up yo! 😀 I’ve prepared a little demo app with my awesome ColorPickerControl for Xamarin.Forms, deployed for Android, iOS and UWP…

Android, iOS and UWP side by side working like a charm! 😀

Project hosted on github:  
https://github.com/UdaraAlwis/XFColorPickerControl 

The possibilities are endless, just a matter of your own creativity! 😉

Conclusion…

An interactive and responsive Color Picker is something that’s missing from Xamarin.Forms out of the box, even when it comes existing to 3rd party controls, there’s no such that fills the requirement, similar to MS Paint Color Picker, or HTML Web Color Pickers.

You can do all kinds of cool interactive 2D graphics rendering stuff with SkiaSharp on Xamarin.Forms, and thanks this, I managed to build a full fledged interactive and fun-to-use Color Picker UI Control, which is lacking in Xamarin.Forms ecosystem right now.

I’m planning to release a nuget package with this control quite soon, with a whole bunch of extra cool features embedded in 😉 So keep in touch!

Imagination is the limit yol! 😉

Share the love! 😀 Cheers!