Request: Composition guide

[cschonewill]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

A simple utility with a couple of handy features to aid in compositional guidance regardless of underlying content and unbound to a specific program. By default this would be a thirds grid, but ideally has customization and features to make it much more useful. Here are my initial suggested features for this tool request:

1. Basic toggleable overlay with settings for either all screens/windows or specific ones. Ability to customize lines drawn and potentially (bonus) control an overlay opacity and color for each quadrant. Ability to have it apply to bounds of screen or a set area with a dropdown for standard image ratios. Ability to create and name custom grids that shift things off standard default thirds.
2. A hotkey-able marquee box that can be used on its own or in conjunction with/on top of the standard grid. One dragged this could be repositioned and adjusted like any window, and minimized or closed in a similar fashion (hide these options until hovering mouse and pressing a key).
3. A hotkey to toggle all grid visibility as set up on and off.
4. Drawn over the top but ability to have it not render into a screen capture video or screenshot if easily togglable.
5. Golden ratio spiral overlay options; global across the whole grid and per cell of the grid.
6. Ability to have different guide grids such as center point crosshair with a customizable shape around it (circle, square, star for example) that can be manipulated in size uniformly and non-uniformly to make ovals, rectangles, etc.
7. Ability to add V shape overlay lines that can also be manipulated, allowing them to be top to bottom, bottom to top, left or right side biased, and any other configuration as positioned and manipulated by a user.

Scenario when this would be used?

For the many people doing creative visual work, this would be a great inbuilt feature to reference while working or check any content displayed on a screen against. Being on the OS instead of within a given tool, it could apply to anything. The base rule of thirds is a great place to start, but the customization can allow art direction to establish modified composition scenarios which can be shared with teams.

A video editor could full screen a particular image, video or youtube content and examine composition against standard or create a variation off of something particularly pleasing, then reference it later in their work or share it with peers. An Art director could establish a unique composition bias for a project and both check work against it and share it with their team to guide their work.

Other such similar or undiscovered opportunities for usefulness.

Supporting information

A few example images of some standard composition guides that ideally could be both used directly and re-created with options within the utility.