Screenshots are dark with picom

[Kai Hendry]

https://s.natalian.org/2020-05-31/picom-killed.png - bright

https://s.natalian.org/2020-05-31/with-picom.png - dark

Maintainer edit

In most cases this problem comes from picom's shadow effect. To fix it, you'll either want to disable shadows completely, or tell picom not to draw shadows on your selection tool.
For hacksaw, add this snippet to your configuration file:

shadow-exclude = [
  "name = 'hacksaw'"
]

[Ivan Tham]

I don't seemed to have any issues. @kaihendry Nice, you are here.

[novenary]

@kaihendry are you using hacksaw to select a screenshot region? Can you provide the info I asked for in neXromancers/hacksaw#33 (comment)?

[Kai Hendry]

Sorry, I'm back to using https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot

[novenary]

No problem, thanks anyway.

[gokul swaminathan]

@9ary the cause seems to be shadows with picom. Hacksaw does dim my screen and screenshots (with shotgun) do turn out dark.

shadows disabled
shadows enabled

selection with shadows
selection without shadows

As you can see, the colors are much brighter without shadows.

Here's my shadow config for picom:

# Shadow
shadow = true;
shadow-radius = 15;
shadow-offset-x = -15;
shadow-offset-y = -15;
shadow-opacity = 0.25;

#shadow-exclude = "(!name = 'rofi' && !class_g = 'Rofi' && !name = 'dunst' && !class_g = 'Dunst' && !class_g *?= 'Polybar')"

shadow-exclude = [
    "class_g *?= 'jgmenu'",
    "class_g *?= 'VirtualBox'",
    "class_g *?= 'Conky'",
    "class_g *?= 'Notify-osd'",
    "class_g *?= 'cairo-dock'",
    "class_g *?= 'trayer'",
    "class_g *?= 'navigator'",
    "class_g *?= 'Cairo-clock'",
    "class_g *?= 'Cairo-dock'",
    "class_g *?= 'Polybar'",
    "class_g *?= 'Docky'",
    "class_g = 'boox'",
    "class_g = 'hacksaw'",
    "_NET_WM_STATE@:32a *= '_NET_WM_STATE_HIDDEN'",
    "window_type = 'dock'",
    "_GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS@:c"
];

[novenary]

Yes, that's what we worked out in the hacksaw thread. Note that hacksaw sets a window title, but not a class, so you might have better luck matching on that. I'll be closing this issue because it's not a shotgun problem.

[Tomasz Kapias]

All answers until the link to a commit (without comment in the issue thread) are false, so for people who will come here for a direct solution :

Add this to your picom config :

shadow-exclude = [
  "name = 'hacksaw'"
]

[novenary]

Thanks for the tip! I'll add this information to the first post here and in the hacksaw issue.