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Back when I wrote the first set of color effects I thought this specific effect would be useless. However, I was wrong as I found out recently. Sometimes you really need a quick way to tint zillions of shapes in one go.

A specific example would be breaking apart some potraced (path->trace bitmap) path. Colorizing it in some random fashion is good enough for checking if everything went well.

A map of Bosnia and Herzegovina with random lightness.

And now you can easily see that the geometry is reasonable and that each region can be tinted individually. :)

Initially the extension randomized each channel, but that wasn't good enough. Then I went over to a combo box (everything, hue, saturation and lightness) and then the same with radio buttons, but that also wasn't good enough. What if you want to randomize saturation and lightness for example? Well, that wasn't possible with that setup.

Check boxes to the rescue.

With 3 check boxes you get a total of 8 (2^3) possible combinations. Well, one of those combinations is nonsense (all off), but the remaining 7 give you quite some flexibility.

Initial grid (SVGZ)

Random Hue

Random Saturation

Random Lightness

Random Hue + Saturation

Random Saturation + Lightness

Random Hue + Lightness

Random Hue + Saturation + Lightness

This Python effect is already in SVN and will be included in the next stable Inkscape release.

If you want to try it right away download the zip file at the bottom and extract it into Inkscape's extension directory. If you're wondering why it's backward compatible with Inkscape 0.45 - that's because color effects don't access the DOM on their own (that part is handled by the color effect base class).

Download: color_randomize.zip (1kb)