Shades chosen for you
Millions of pixel colours become a handful of paint groups. You stop squinting at two patches wondering which is darker — the decision is made, and measured.
Features
Everything the studio does
Every one of these works today, offline, on your own device.
Every shade gets its own map
Tap shade 05 and only shade 05 appears, exactly where it belongs. Fill it, outline it, or mark it with dots so you can see the reference underneath.
Mixed from your tubes
Tick the paints you own and get real recipes — "48 parts Titanium White, 2 parts Burnt Sienna, a touch of Yellow Ochre" — worked out with subtractive pigment mixing, not screen colour.
Hue separation you control
Decide whether shades follow the value structure or the colour families, to help preserve distinctions between similar colour families.
Measure the colour difference
The match between your shades and the photograph is measured in CIEDE2000 and shown plainly. No guessing whether you need more shades.
The transfer drawing
Switch to outlines and you have the boundary drawing for squaring up onto canvas — the same shapes you are about to fill.
Fix what the machine got wrong
No algorithm is right everywhere. Paint corrections straight onto the mask, merge shades that are too close, split one that is doing too much work.
Your reference never leaves
Everything happens in your browser — the analysis, the masks, the exports. Your photographs are not uploaded by the studio. Account and billing requests use a separate server API.
Under the hood
Measured, not eyeballed
Perceptual colour, not RGB
Grouping happens in CIE L*a*b*, where distance matches what your eye judges. RGB thinks a shadow and a highlight are neighbours; Lab does not.
Edges survive
An edge-aware refinement pass weighs colour fit against agreement with neighbouring pixels, discounted across boundaries — so smoothing calms noise in a cheek without dissolving an eyelid.
Real pigment mixing
Recipes use subtractive Kubelka–Munk mixing, so blue and yellow make green and white lightens by scattering. A screen colour is not a pigment, and the recipes respect that.
Ratios painters use
A light skin tint is a knife-tip of burnt sienna in a pile of white — closer to 48:1 than 3:1. The search covers those ratios and reports the match in CIEDE2000.
Small details protected
Noise specks get absorbed; a gold bead, a bindi or a catchlight does not, because a patch is only merged into a neighbour genuinely close in colour.
Local by construction
The heavy pass runs once in a background thread on your own machine. No account before you try it, and no server holding your references.
Exports
Get the work off the screen
- Any layer, or every layer, as a full-resolution PNG — filled, outlined or dotted
- Over white, over the reference, over a dimmed reference, or transparent
- The flat colour map, for reference beside the easel
- A printable paint sheet: every shade with its number, hex, area and mixture
- Palette as CSV, or palette plus recipes as JSON
- A project file that keeps your corrections, to reopen later
See it on your own reference.
It takes a few seconds and costs nothing.
Open the studioFree to try · no card · nothing leaves your device