Palette tool
The Palette tab is the generator. Seeds go in on the right, a harmony algorithm spreads them into a full palette, and the board in the middle is where you lock, reorder and pick colors.
Everything regenerates live: move a slider and the board updates as you drag.
Harmony Seeds
Seeds are the colors the whole palette is derived from. Up to eight, each one a swatch, a hex field, a padlock and a remove button.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| + | Adds a seed. Eight is the cap |
| Swatch | Opens the color picker |
| Hex field | Type or paste a hex directly |
| 🔒 | Locks that seed — re-rolls leave it alone |
| ✕ | Removes the seed. The last one can't be removed |
Locking is the whole workflow
A palette rarely arrives all at once. Lock what already works, re-roll the rest with R, and repeat. Unlock All at the bottom of the panel clears every lock in one go.
Algorithm
Seven modes, all working in HSL space:
| Algorithm | What comes out |
|---|---|
| Monochromatic | One hue, varied in saturation and lightness |
| Analogous | Neighbours on the hue wheel — cohesive, calm |
| Complementary | The seed and its opposite |
| Split Complementary | The seed plus the two hues either side of its opposite |
| Triadic | Three hues evenly spaced around the wheel |
| Tetradic | Four hues in two complementary pairs |
| Color Ramps | A stepped ramp per seed, for shading rather than variety |
Color Ramps changes two controls: Count becomes Ramp Steps (3–12), and Spread becomes Hue Shift — how far the hue drifts as the ramp moves from dark to light, which is what stops a ramp looking like a grey wash. The panel tells you the arithmetic: 3 ramps × 6 steps = 18 colors.
Sliders
| Slider | Range | Default effect |
|---|---|---|
| Count | 4–64 | How many swatches the palette holds |
| Ramp Steps | 3–12 | Steps per ramp, in Color Ramps only |
| Saturation | −50% – +50% | Shifts the whole palette's saturation |
| Lightness | −50% – +50% | Shifts the whole palette's lightness |
| Spread | 5° – 120° | How wide the harmony reaches around the hue wheel |
| Variation | 0% – 60% | Random wander per color — 0 is clinical, 60 is chaos |
Randomize Generator re-rolls the unlocked seeds. With a preset active it reads Randomize Nature, Randomize Cyberpunk, and so on, and stays inside that preset's hue, saturation and lightness constraints instead of roaming the whole wheel.
Presets and saved engines
The left panel has two tabs.
Presets holds fourteen moods, each one a set of seeds plus the constraints it randomizes within:
Nature, Ocean, DMG-Classic, Cyberpunk, Clay-Art, Deep-Void, Toy-Box, Gore, Ember, PS1-Era, Plague, Nordic, High-Vis, Vaporwave.
Custom is your own library. Name the current setup and save it — the whole generator state is captured, not just the colors, so loading it puts you back where you were. Saved entries can be renamed, updated with the current palette, or deleted, and the library exports and imports as a single JSON file so it moves between machines.
The board
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| 🖱️ Click a swatch | Open the picker and edit that color |
| 🖱️ Right-click | Lock the color, or copy its hex |
| 🖱️ Drag a swatch | Reorder the palette |
| 🖱️ Drag empty space | Pan the workspace |
| 🖱️ Scroll | Zoom |
| Space | Recenter and refit |
The Square / Strip toggle at the top left switches the board's layout. It's a view setting for working — the exported texture's layout is chosen separately in the export dialog.
Sorting
The sort dropdown reorders the palette in place:
| Sort | Order |
|---|---|
| Smooth | Smoothest visual gradient |
| Hue | Warm → cool, red through violet |
| Lightness | Dark → light |
| Saturation | Most vivid first |
| Luminance | Dark → light, by perceived brightness |
| Reverse | Flips the current order |
Lightness and Luminance are not the same sort. Lightness is the HSL number; luminance weights the channels the way an eye does, so a saturated yellow lands far brighter than a blue of identical lightness. Sort by luminance when you're checking that a palette reads in greyscale.
Checking for color blindness
The eye icon switches the whole board into a simulated vision mode:
| Mode | Simulates |
|---|---|
| Normal Vision | No filter |
| Protanopia | No red — around 1% of men |
| Deuteranopia | No green — around 6% of men |
| Tritanopia | No blue — around 0.01% |
| Achromatopsia | Greyscale — around 0.003% |
While a mode is active, colors that collapse into each other are flagged as conflicting pairs; clicking one highlights everything it conflicts with. The auto-fix button pushes conflicting colors apart — locked colors are left alone, so lock the ones you can't change before you use it.
Deuteranopia is the one that matters
At roughly one in sixteen men, green-blind is common enough that a palette which fails it will fail for real players. If you only check one mode, check that one.
Importing a palette
The Import button above the board — or dropping a file anywhere on the workspace — reads:
| Type | Extensions |
|---|---|
| Palette files | .json, .hex, .gpl, .txt |
| Swatch files | .ase, .aco |
| Images | .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .webp, .bmp, .gif |
These are the same formats the Proto Color add-on reads, so a palette moves between the two in either direction.
Images are handled two ways depending on what's in them. Under 256 unique colors and the image is treated as a literal palette — a pixel-art strip or an exported swatch sheet comes in exactly as authored, in the order it appears. Above that it's artwork, and the colors are quantized out of it, capped at 1024.
Feed it a screenshot
The fastest way to match a reference is to drop the reference in. A frame grab from a game, a photo, a piece of concept art — the extractor pulls the palette, and then the sliders are there to push it somewhere of your own.
Next
- UV Checker — the palette you just built is available there as a live color source
- Export & sharing — getting it out and into Blender