One shade at a time

A layer per shade

Every shade the analysis finds becomes its own layer with its own mask. Select it and the rest of the picture steps back — to a dimmed reference, plain white, grey, or nothing at all. What is left is the exact area that shade belongs in, and how much of the picture it accounts for.

Three ways to look at a layer

• Fill — the whole region in its colour. Best for understanding shape and quantity.
• Outline — boundaries only. This is your transfer drawing, and what you square up onto canvas.
• Dots — a regular pattern of marks clipped exactly to the mask. For marking an area without covering the reference underneath, which suits thin paint and glazes.

Checking any spot

Doubt a patch? Hover it with the colour probe, on the reference or on the map — a crosshair marks the same spot in both at once. You are told the reference colour there, the shade the map assigned, the measured distance between them, and which shade was closest by colour when that differs, so a questionable area can be checked rather than argued with.

The transfer grid

Squaring up is how a drawing gets onto canvas. A grid can be ruled over both the reference and the map at once — by column count or by a fixed cell size, with square cells, lettered and numbered cells, and optional diagonals — so a cell in one view is the same cell in the other. It can be included in exports, and any view can be taken full screen with floating controls for switching between the original, a layer and the grid while you work.

Which shades carry the picture

Layers can be ordered by how much of the picture they cover, ranked with a bar apiece, and the panel says how few shades make up half of it — usually three or four. That is the answer to how much to mix: a pile of the first two, a knife-tip of the ones under one per cent. The ranking is carried into the palette exports and the printable sheet.

The original, always underneath

A slider runs from the map to the photograph, so you can see the reference through the boundaries and judge how a transition should actually behave. There is also a mode showing every boundary at once, and layer numbers dropped into each patch when you want the whole picture at a glance.

Reorganise the shades

Two shades too close to mix separately? Merge them, and the colour becomes the weighted average of both areas. One shade doing too much work across a face? Split it in two or three and it re-clusters just those pixels. Neither needs re-analysing the photograph.

Correct what the machine got wrong

No segmentation is right everywhere. Turn on the correction brush and paint areas into the active layer, restore the original analysis where you overdid it, or sample the layer under the cursor. Forty steps of undo and redo, and the corrected map is what exports.