I had trouble mixing paints to match colours in my reference photos so I wrote myself a computer program to help. I can load a photo of my paints to tell it what I have available and photos of my mixes so it can tell me how far off I am and what to add next.

I added code to generate a sketch from the reference, scale it to my canvas and print it for tracing over multiple sheets with markers to line them all up properly.

There’s code to break the reference image into areas of colour close to my available paints.

You can load photos of your work-in-progress and it can compare them with your reference and suggest changes.

No one but me has used it yet and I’d love it if someone could look at the web site and give it a go.

You can find it at https://www.artistshelper.com/p/lemmy.html

It’ll be full of bugs to start with but if you report 'em I’ll try to fix 'em.

  • MayaM
    2•4 years ago

    :O :O :O :O :O I have been looking for tools to play around with color gamuts in this way!!! I will definitely play around with this!!!

  • MayaM
    1•4 years ago

    update: found a machine I was willing to run semi-trusted code on and it said the application was damaged. What does this mean? No idea. I then tried to execute the Java version but it needed newer Java than this machine has and… I don’t feel like doing software version jiujitsu at the moment.

    • @artistshelperOP
      2•4 years ago

      Hi kixiQu,

      so sorry for the delay in responding, the emails about your messages got sent to “spam” and I’ve only just seen 'em.

      If you were on MacOS the “damaged” notification is a new wording of the notification that it shows when the image is signed with a non-Apple software signature. I got mine from Sectigo. Apple want me to sign over my soul for one.

      I’ve added a bit to the trouble shooting page: trouble shooting

      For any quarantined application, or directory, you can permanently remove the quarantine attribute flag (com.apple.quarantine) by using this command in a Terminal window or iTerm.

      sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ArtistsHelper.app

      That’s -d for delete and optionally -r for recursive. You’ll be asked for a password to check you know what you’re doing.

      If you were on Windows I dunno. My problem is that the machines I have access to for testing all seem to trust anything I do!

      I’d really appreciate it if you had another stab.