How to do things

Drag an image onto the studio, paste one from the clipboard, or use Open image. JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF all work, at any size your device can decode. The original is never modified.

Sixteen suits most portraits. Fewer gives a bolder reduction; more gives a closer match and more mixing. Since shades can be merged afterwards without re-analysing, starting high costs nothing.

Press I or turn on Colour probe, then hover any spot on either view. A crosshair marks the same place in both the reference and the colour map, and you are told the reference colour there, the shade the map assigned, how far apart they are, and — when they differ — which shade was actually closest by colour. Click to pin a reading.

Press G or open Grid in the control bar. Choose divisions by column count or by cell size, keep square cells ticked so what you rule on canvas matches, and turn on labels to get A1, B2 and so on. Tick Include grid in exports to have it printed on the layers you export.

The ⤢ button at the top right of the working view fills the screen and keeps the whole interface — inspector sidebar, shade strip and controls. Hide panels folds them away for just the picture, with a floating bar for switching views, toggling the grid and stepping through shades. Esc steps back out.

The Layers panel can sort by Largest area, ranking every shade by how much of the picture it covers, with a bar for each. It also tells you how few shades make up half the picture — usually three or four — so you know which to mix in quantity and which need only a knife-tip.

The Layers panel reports the average colour difference between your shades and the original. Under about 2 is indistinguishable at normal viewing distance; past 4, add shades.

Tap a swatch in the strip, or press the number keys. Set Behind to a dimmed original to see the reference through the mask, or to white for a clean printable mask.

In the Shade panel, Merge into… folds one shade into another and averages the colour by area. Split in 2 or 3 re-clusters just that shade’s pixels. Neither re-analyses the photograph.

Turn on Correct mask, then drag to paint areas into the active shade. Restore puts the analysis back, and holding Alt samples the shade under the cursor. Undo covers the last forty steps.

Open My paints and tick only the tubes you own. Every recipe is computed from that list, so nothing suggests a colour you would have to buy. The list runs light to dark by default, the way a palette is laid out, and can be grouped by colour family instead. Your selection is remembered between sessions.

Tube colours vary by brand and batch. Click the colour square beside a paint to set it to what yours actually looks like, and recipes recompute against the corrected value.

No mixture can be darker than your darkest tube. If a near-black target will not match, that is a physical limit rather than a search failure — add a darker paint to the list.

The Export menu writes any single layer or every layer as a full-resolution PNG, the flat colour map, a printable sheet of all shades with their mixtures, and the palette as CSV or JSON.

Save project file writes a single file holding your reference, the map and every correction you have made. Open it later to carry on exactly where you left off.

Use your browser’s Install or Add to Home Screen option. It then opens like any other app and works with no connection.