Hello, fellow painters.

This post is a new feature discussion: implementing a realistic paint mixer in form of a palette.

As you might have noticed, in Krita and most other digital painting applications (including Photoshop, Corel Painter, Mypaint) when you mix yellow and blue you get the gray color as a result. That is because of the mathematical model of color in programs, where yellow (red + green) and blue have no common basis and neutralize each other, sort of.

Yet there is an algorithm that allows simulating real-life behavior of colors: the Kubelka-Munk model of color mixing.

It is obvious that applying this model to Krita as a whole (meaning the document and its canvas) is too risky: the amount of filters upon filters, layers with tons of blending modes, masks and color spaces will simply result in a mass of unpredictible and buggy situations. Instead, it could be implemented as a separate palette. Think of a scratchboard.

In fact, it would be a comeback of a thing that once existed, but was swept out of Krita. Check out this blog post by Boudewijn almost ten years ago: http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi ... mixer_done.



Why is this even a thing? Well, if you have experience in painting with natural media: mixing watercolor, oil or gouache paint, you might get surprised by the yellow-blue mix resulting in grey instead of green. A video for inspiration https://youtu.be/TNB3XY67Q-I?t=23m22s

So, if this topic gets any support or positive discussion, I should have a chance to propose this feature on Phabricator with proper description, UI mockup — and one day it may even get to a next Kickstarter shortlist of features!

Thank you for reading!

Yeah... We had to drop this feature because it was never fully implemented (other base colors than the one you see were not available) and the author dropped out of development to devote his time to his student union. I would love to see it back, but I cannot see me or Dmitry working on it, so it needs someone with enthousiasm and time to step in!

We had a discussion about this feature in another thread, a while ago:
viewtopic.php?f=288&t=133217

I am not sure if it covers the technical side of the mixing results you are after, but it is a step to that direction.