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Practical Pigment Mixing for Digital Painting (scrtwpns.com)
60 points by rck on Jan 22, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



I hope this gets brought to Procreate.

I’ve always had trouble handling color when painting digitally, despite immediately grasping it when painting with oils. I knew there was something off about blending but this was my first time actually seeing a side by side—it finally clicked why it’s wrong (and it reminds me of another recent HN post about CSS gradients and avoid the gray zone).


Nice! Artrage[1] has had this functionality since 2013(!), and I'm honestly surprised it has taken so long for this to show up in ( literally any ) other software;

1: https://www.artrage.com/


Came here to say the same! I remember vividly being impressed by its paint simulation almost a decade ago, and watercolor mixing. The wheel keeps spinning.

There has been a ton of uptake for alternative color spaces in design tools recently, especially to generate nicer gradients. It’s surprising that art software would be the slowest to evolve.


Oh that's lovely! I hope this gets integrated into more software soon, though I'm definitely going to check out Rebelle [1] that has it now. It'd be nice to be able to do realistic watercolors without having to actually break out the watercolors!

[1]https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/about


thats quite interesting.

Also from that same site : https://ebsynth.com/ Making a digital paining a moving object using video frames... damned clever. I feel inspired to draw/paint again just to play with it.


Without downloading and trying it out myself, I'm skeptical of the claim that Corel Painter doesn't mix colors correctly; this is one of their main selling points. I suspect they just left it in RGB mode instead of switching to CYMK mode. Can anyone confirm?


I just tested Corel Painter by mixing blue and yellow and it does not. You end up with a sort of grey color, not green. I do not see a CMYK option in the preferences either.


Confirmed, no CYMK mode in painter. I'm extremely surprised; it's like the product's main selling point: reflecting real world media.


I think the talk video (last on the linked page) does a really good job of explaining the problems surrounding natural vs digital (RGB) pigments mixing, and how the Mixbox folks overcame them to create good-looking outcomes.


You're an actual saint! Thank you so much!!!


Note: requires a separate (paid?) license to use commercially


if there's no patents (which i dont know if true or not), you can read the paper, and reimplement it without looking at the source (provided you have the skills i suppose...).

But the effort probably isn't worth the cost of a license imho.


Yeah, but I was referring to the software that implements this. Hopefully Krita/MyPaint/GIMP/etc do the reimplementation that you suggested.




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