[ui/ux] Enabling locking Layer controls, preventing accidental changes

[psobolewskiPhD]

🚀 Feature

It should be possible to lock the layer controls to prevent accidental changes to contrast limits, gamma, etc.

Motivation

When visualizing multiplex images it's common to spend considerable time adjusting contrast, colormaps, gamma etc. to obtain the best visualization for a (sub)set of layers.
When going between layers and getting cursor info in the status bar, or adding annotations it can be easy to not realize what layer is selected.
Then one may accidentally change the layer controls of the wrong layer.

Pitch

A GUI padlock button in (the top left of?) the layer controls that when clicked disables all the UI elements in the widget, putting them in the greyed out state. It would change to a locked version. Clicking the locked version would unlock the controls returning the widgets to enabled state.

Alternatives

• instead of GUI icon to lock the controls, the lock option could be in the LayerList contextual menu: Lock layer controls

  • controls would be disabled and greyed out.

• another option would be to right-click in the layer controls widget itself to get a contextual menu to lock/unlock.

• Could be combined with Locking Layers #3466 (lock to prevent deletion) to have a lock on the layer in the layer list instead, locking the controls and preventing deletion, to yield the equivalent Photoshop lock layer which prevents editing and deletion.
  In this case, would add this to the contextual menu and have a locked padlock icon appear on the layer in the layer list:
  

Additional context

This came up in a workshop I recently ran.

Also related to: #1570
especially this proposal from Kevin:
#1570 (comment)

And also this issue to control what aspects of the viewer are mutable:
#1273

Both of the above seems more about preventing users from doing something. So that a plugin or script could protect something. My motivation is rather the GUI user being able to prevent themselves from accidentally editing something they might regret later.

[d-v-b]

When visualizing multiplex images it's common to spend considerable time adjusting contrast, colormaps, gamma etc. to obtain the best visualization for a (sub)set of layers.

Another feature that could help with this scenario would be to expose the current state of the viewer (including these manually adjusted settings) as data (e.g., JSON) that can be saved. Neuroglancer does this and it's a massive timesaver.