Chromilla paint mixing tool

Chromilla Pro tool

Mix Correction

You have paint on the palette already and it is nearly right, just a little too warm, or too dark, or slightly green. Mix Correction takes the color you have and the color you want, and names one tube and one small amount to add. It is for the middle of a session, when starting the mix again would waste paint you have already made.

Already have a recipe from the mixer? Use Check my mix on the recipe card instead.

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How to use it

  1. Set your medium: acrylic, oil or watercolor. It is shared with the mixer.
  2. Fill the first card, your mix. Sample it with the camera, from a photo, or type a hex value if you are matching something on screen.
  3. Fill the second card the same way with your target color.
  4. Read the verdict. Chromilla names the direction you are off (too warm, too cool, too red, too green, too light, too dark), then gives one tube and one dose, from the tiniest touch up to about a pea, roughly half a percent to eight percent of your current mix volume.
  5. Stir, re-sample, repeat. If you overshoot, use the next smaller dose.

How it reads the gap

Both samples are converted to Lab, which separates how light a color is from its hue. The tool then asks which problem dominates. If the hue difference is larger than the lightness difference, it reports a hue verdict: too warm or too cool along the yellow-blue axis, too red or too green along the red-green axis. If lightness dominates, it simply says too light or too dark. That single word on the verdict pill is the largest single difference between your mix and your target, nothing more elaborate.

The correction is chosen by brute force, honestly. Every tube in your set is tried at each of the five doses, each result is simulated as a blend in linear light, and the combination that lands closest to the target in Lab distance wins, with the smaller dose preferred on a tie. The distance it minimizes is plain Lab distance, a simpler measure than the CIEDE2000 the main mixer is benchmarked with, which is one more reason to treat the suggestion as a nudge rather than a guarantee.

What it cannot do

It suggests one tube at a time, at one of five fixed doses, and it models the result as a straightforward blend of light rather than with the full pigment model the main mixer uses. That makes it quick and roughly right for a small nudge, and steadily less reliable the further apart your mix and target are. If the gap is large, mixing again from a proper recipe beats nudging.

It compares what the camera saw, not what is on the knife. Sample both colors under the same light, ideally in the same photo, or the difference it measures will be partly your lighting. It draws suggestions from your active palette when you have one, and from the full pigment set otherwise, so keeping the palette current keeps the advice usable. It also cannot judge wet against dry paint: acrylics in particular shift as they dry, so compare like with like.

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