Free with any account
Palette Builder
Palette Builder is where you tell Chromilla which tubes are actually on your table. Save that set, make it active, and every recipe the mixer gives you is written with those paints only, instead of paints you would have to go and buy. Most painters reach for it once at the start of a project, then again when they swap to a different medium or a different box.
How to use it
- Choose your medium: acrylic, oil or watercolor. That setting is shared with the mixer, so changing it here changes it there too.
- Pick a brand line if you paint from one. The picker then shows only that line's colors. With no brand chosen you select from the generic pigment library instead, grouped by pigment family.
- Tap each tube you own. Search by color name or by pigment code (PB15, PY74 and so on) when a set is long.
- Name the palette and save it. You can keep several and edit any of them later.
- Set one palette active. The active palette is the set the mixer solves within.
How the reference palette is built
The set you pick from comes from two places, and it never mixes them silently. Choose a brand line and the picker shows only that line's tubes, using the pigment codes the manufacturer prints on the label (PY74, PB15 and so on). Choose no brand and you get the union of every tube we hold verified catalog data for, grouped by pigment family. A paint made from two or three pigments adds all of them, because that is what is actually in the tube.
Each entry is stored as pigment codes first and a display color second. Where we have a measured masstone for a pigment, the swatch shows that measurement. Where we do not, the swatch is a hatched square rather than a guess, and the solver still knows the pigment's identity for mixing. When you save a palette, what is saved is the list of pigment codes, so a recipe written from it names the same tubes you ticked.
What it cannot do
It does not know what is in your tubes until you tell it. Nothing is detected automatically here: the palette is only as accurate as the tubes you tick.
A smaller palette is honest, not better. Restricting the solver to four tubes means some target colors simply cannot be reached, and the mixer will say so rather than pretend. If a color keeps coming back as a poor match, the palette, not the solver, is usually the limit.
Brand coverage is uneven. Where we hold verified data for a line, the picker uses that line's colors and pigment codes. Where we do not, you are choosing from generic pigments, which are a reasonable stand-in but not your specific manufacturer's paint. Some library entries have no measured masstone yet and show a hatched square instead of a color, which is us saying we do not know rather than guessing.
Related
- Area Sampler: pull the highlight, midtone and shadow out of a shape in a reference photo.
- Mix Correction: you already have paint on the palette knife and it is close but wrong.
- Color mixing chart: what a limited palette can and cannot reach.
- The science page: how the mixing model, brand calibration and dry-down work, including where they fall short.