How to Use the App
Interactive Exploration
This tool is designed for exploring a 12-part CMYW pigment pyramid and extracting practical color recipes for studio work. Each sphere represents one mixture made from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and White.
Navigate the space: Drag to rotate the pyramid freely, scroll or pinch to zoom, and inspect the spatial relationship between deep mixtures, saturated primaries, and bright tints.
Layer slicing: Use the vertical White Layer slider to isolate floors by white content. The Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow layer sliders isolate slices from each primary-color vertex toward the opposite face. Hidden spheres remain visible as small reference points, so the tetrahedral structure stays readable.
Real-time recipes: Hover with a mouse, or tap on touch screens, to reveal the exact 12-part recipe for any visible sphere.
Rendering modes: Choose between Glossy, Matte, and Brush rendering. Glossy keeps the polished sphere look, Matte reduces reflections, and Brush adds a subtle procedural bump texture inspired by oil paint dragged with a brush.
Advanced Calibration
Use the Settings panel to adjust the primary colors and compare three mixing approaches.
RGB: A simple channel mixer. Each primary follows its selected hue through the HSL Lightness axis, from a darker endpoint through the most saturated core color toward white.
Optical: A density-based subtractive model that uses the same hue/lightness routing, then builds darker mixtures when primaries overlap.
Spectral KM: A synthetic reflectance model using Kubelka-Munk-style absorption and scattering, without measured pigment datasets.
The swatches change only the primary hues. Darkness expands each primary's lightness range toward black. Advanced controls expose Strength, White Strength, and Mix Darkening for experiments. Reset restores the default palette and calibration.
Credits
This app was created by Ofir Shavit with AI-assisted development by Codex, OpenAI's coding assistant. The color model, interface direction, and artistic calibration choices were developed through an iterative human-AI collaboration.