Color selection in Reports

[gabmis]

Hi! Thank you for the great work!

Proposal Summary

Reports are very nice but would be significantly better if we were able to modify plot colors in them.

Motivation

It's useful to have visible (e.g. in dark mode) and coherent (throughout the report) colors.
Currently, we can't seem to have that because we can't set colors in reports and the colors we set in the experiment comparison view aren't persistent w.r.t the embedding operation.

Related Discussion

Couldn't find any related discussions

Best,
Gabriel Misrachi

[ainoam]

Thanks for pointing this out @gabmis.

Currently, we can't seem to have that

Since plot colors persist across comparisons (i.e. the same experiment will have the same color), and embedding a plot basically retrieves those plots - The solution would be to make sure that the color transformation into reports (to keep dark mode visibility) is coherent rather than going and manually changing the color for all plots manually. Wouldn't you agree?

[gabmis]

Hi! thanks for answering so quickly, my bad for taking so much time to respond (was off of work).
Yes that sounds like a desirable solution. Are you considering implementing it?
By the way, although I had observed it myself, I could not find any documentation to ensure this persistence (between comparison view) existed, do you know if there is any.
Best,
Gabriel

[ainoam]

@gabmis the color dark-mode transformation persistency issue should be fixed in future versions.

Though not explicitly documented, this is a core principle of the ClearML UI, that a plot variable should use the same color across plots (unless manually overridden). This should hold for all plots, and specifically in comparison (where the "variable" is the experiment name). What documentation were you looking for?

[gabmis]

I was not aware of that principle. That's what I was looking for.

Not sure we're understanding the same thing.
I thought your point was that colors which are set in the comparison view should persist into the reports. Is that what you're saying?

[ainoam]

@gabmis As long as comparison is presented in a light background and reports are shown in a dark background (we'll sort that out, eventually) - Keeping the exact color in both might prove an eye-sore in at least one of the two. For that reason, ClearML changes the color when embedding in a report to accommodate the dark theme. We'll fix this transformation to be consistent (i.e. two reports embedding the same plot will use the same colors, which might not be the same exact colors as in the original comparison, but better suited for dark theme)

[gabmis]

Interesting @ainoam and thanks a lot for the clarification.
Isn't it hard to find a color mapping (between light and dark mode) s.t. it preserves the contrast with the background and between the colors of the different series for all possible colors.?
My opinion is that it would be simpler to defer that choice to the user by using the exact same color in the reports and the comparison view, although users would have to use colors which work well in both light and dark mode.
Might require using a dark-mode friendly set of default colors in the comparison view, for reports to work well when the user kept the defaults.
What do you think?

[ainoam]

@gabmis It's not so much as transforming all possible colors as the actual colors in a specific plot...
Future versions will eventually provide for color selection in reports as well (I would expect this might coincide with full dark/light mode support, but this is further down our roadmap), which will still adhere to maintaining the same color for a specific plot variable across plots.

As you noted crafting a set of colors that works for both dark and light mode is tricky, so the current plan is to maintain the defaults the light theme defaults and guarantee the dark them transform when required (i.e. report embed).

Does this make sense?