Chromilla paint mixing tool

Chromilla Pro tool

Area Sampler

Painting one form, say a jug or a cheek or a stretch of roof, means finding three colors rather than one: where the light hits, where it turns, and where it drops away. Area Sampler takes a reference photo, lets you paint over the shape you care about, and reads back the highlight, midtone and shadow of that shape as three colors with a mixing recipe each. It is for the moment when you can see the form but cannot name the three paints that build it.

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How to use it

  1. Drop a reference photo onto the canvas, or pick one from your device. The image is processed in your browser and is not uploaded.
  2. Select one shape. Use the brush (size and hardness are adjustable) or the lasso, and undo or clear if you stray. Keyboard works too: arrow keys and space to paint, enter to close a lasso path.
  3. Read the three tones. Chromilla converts the selected pixels to Lab, trims the brightest and darkest three percent (specular glints and edge pixels), then averages the bottom, middle and top bands into a shadow, a midtone and a highlight.
  4. Use the results: each tone carries a short recipe, and you can send any of them to the mixer, save it, export the set as a palette card or copy it as Markdown.

How it handles skin tones

It does nothing skin-specific, and that is worth knowing. There is no face detection and no skin model: every pixel you select is converted to Lab, sorted by lightness, and the brightest and darkest three percent are trimmed away before the three bands are averaged. Specular glints on a nose or forehead usually land in that trimmed top sliver, which is exactly where they belong.

In practice this works well on skin because skin is low-chroma and smoothly graded, so a selection over a cheek or forehead returns three quiet, closely related colors rather than noise. The limits come from the photo, not the math: a face lit by mixed daylight and a warm lamp will straddle both, heavy makeup or strong colored bounce light is read as literally as anything else, and a tight selection that catches stubble or pores can drag the shadow band darker than the form really is. Select the planes, not the details.

What it cannot do

The recipes on this page come from a small set of primary pigments and are capped at three parts, so treat them as a starting mix rather than a finished one. They do not use the tubes in your saved palette. For a recipe built inside your own palette, send a tone to the mixer with that palette active.

It reads the photo, not the subject. Whatever your camera did to the white balance, the exposure and the lighting is baked into the colors it returns, so a warm indoor snapshot gives warm results. Select a reasonable area too: very small selections are rejected, and covering most of the frame averages several forms into mush.

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