PaintsightPalette from a photo
The main colors of your reference, each with its share of the picture, its value and whether it reads warm or cool.
or drop or paste one here
Using the palette to plan a painting
- Set the number of colors to the number of masses you plan to block in. Six to eight suits most landscapes; a simple still life may need four.
- Switch the order to dark to light. The values of the swatches are the value plan of the painting: if they bunch together, the picture will read flat.
- Tap a color, or click the photo, to see everywhere that mixture is needed. Widen the match range to include its near neighbors.
- Open the warm and cool map to see where the color shifts temperature, such as a cool shadow on a warm wall. Compared with the photo, it shows the shifts within an overall warm or cool light.
The value of each mixture matters more than its exact hue: see value and color. For the big light and dark shapes, use the value study maker.
Questions
How are the colors chosen?
The tool samples about 24,000 points spread evenly over the photo and sorts them into groups of colors that look alike, using k-means clustering in CIE Lab, a color space laid out by how different colors look to the eye. Groups that look the same are merged, so you can get fewer colors than you asked for. The same photo always gives the same palette.
Why are the swatches duller than the brightest colors in the photo?
Each swatch is the average of a whole group of pixels, so it sits in the middle of the group, not at its most intense edge. That's the color to mix for the mass. Save the stronger color for accents.
What does the value number mean?
Value runs from 0 (black) to 10 (white), like the Munsell value scale many painters use. It's CIE L*, a measure of lightness as the eye sees it, divided by 10, so 5 is a middle gray.
How does it decide warm or cool?
Colors with very little chroma are neutral. The rest are warm if their hue is among the reds, oranges, yellows and yellow-greens, and cool from the blue-greens round to the violets. In painting, warm and cool are relative, so the map can also measure each color against the photo's own overall color.
Can it give me paint mixes?
No. It gives hex and RGB codes for screens, and paints don't mix like light. Use the value and the warm or cool reading to judge your mix against the swatch.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The palette is worked out in your browser and the photo stays on your device.
Your palette at the easel
In Paintsight the palette stays with each reference photo, along with flat color blocks for the block-in, the warm and cool map, a chroma map of where the most intense color sits, and a color wheel that names the scheme.
For iPhone and iPad.