Palette Checker

Palette Checker allows you to load an image and analyze it by color, including a color plot over a Munsell color wheel, value (grayscale), saturation (how vivid a color is), 3-values (light, middle, dark) and Notan (dark/light). Designed for artists, the image can be any photograph, allowing you to analyze your artwork and your reference photos. If you’ve ever wondered what an image would look like if you were able to collect the colors together into groups, then this is the app for you.

The app takes an image and groups the colors at three different levels of groupings, so you can choose between “most”, “middle” and “least” amount of colors to suit your image. Each level can be analyzed in any of ten ways.

As you know, an image is made up of a number of pixels - squares of color. The number of pixels in an image is referred to as its resolution.

In the Free version, you are limited to work in the lowest resolution (i.e. reduced magnification). That is usually enough to get a great understanding of your image, and many people stay at that level. Upgrading to the Professional version allows you to work with a greater number of pixels in your image (typically 2x and 4x that of the lowest resolution).

Gain insights into images like never before. Perfect for artists who are feeling a little "stuck" with their photo references or their own pieces of art. Also helpful for abstract artists wanting to know how their art looks in terms of color profile. For instance, are there two colors competing for saturation? Is everything a mid-gray when it is reduced to black and white? What does the Notan design look like?

In Color Picker mode, you can look at individual pixels for its RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation, value) and color-family. RGB and HSV are used in computer graphics programs to describe a color. Color Picker mode gives you a color disk that you can use to mix your paint to when trying to color match your reference.

In the Professional version, you can export the image and any of the analysis graphs to your camera roll.

As an artist, you will find this app hugely useful in your practice as a pair of “fresh eyes” and to help you come up with ideas to move your art forwards. It’s also fascinating to analyze all sorts of images to give you artistic ideas.

Try it for free to start with. See how you get on. If you like it, please consider upgrading to go Ad-free and to get the extra functionality of the Professional level.