How Huelow works: from any color to a paint recipe

The three steps in brief

1. Choose the color to match: a hex code, a photo, a shade from your paint brand or a palette.
2. Get paint recipes with ratios: a single paint, a 2-paint mix or a 3-paint mix, ranked by how close they get.
3. Buy fewer paints: Pool merges your palettes and reuses the same paints across colors.

Step 1: choose the color to match

Every recipe starts from a target color. You can give Huelow one in four ways.

• Type a hex code. If you already know the color, enter its hex code, for example #C1502E.
• Sample it from a photo. Import a photo in Create. In Auto mode, Huelow extracts the main colors of the image. In Manual mode, you click any zone and Huelow averages the zones you pick, then warns you when they disagree or when a zone is irregular (a gradient, a highlight, a texture), because such a sample would give a misleading target. Zoom and sampling size help you target a small detail.
• Pick a shade from the catalog. Use a paint of your brand as the target, for example to see whether you could mix it from paints you already own instead of buying it.
• Start from a palette. Create is a free color palette generator. Choose a harmony rule (complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary, tetradic, monochromatic, compound, gradient or random), lock the colors you like and tune four sliders: cold to warm, pastel to vivid, dark to light, muted to contrasted. Save your palettes to your account and send any color to Paint Mix.

Create is a creative tool: it does not check that a palette can be painted with a given brand. Paint Mix and Pool do that.

Step 2: get paint recipes with ratios

Paint Mix compares your target with your brand's catalog and returns ranked proposals, in four kinds:

• Closest shade. One paint, no mixing.
• 2-paint mix. Two catalog paints mixed.
• 3-paint mix. Three catalog paints mixed.
• From my stock. The best shade or mix using only the paints you own.

Each kind shows several proposals, from the most faithful to the simplest, so you can accept a slightly larger gap for an easier mix.

• Ratios you can measure. Huelow works as a paint ratio calculator: every paint in a mix is at least 10% of the total, and proportions move in steps of 5%. They are given in parts, or in drops for dropper-bottle ranges such as Scale 75 and Green Stuff World.
• A quality label on every result. Huelow scores each result with ΔE2000 (explained below) and labels it: perfect match, an existing catalog color; near-perfect match, ΔE under 3; correct match, under 6; notable gap, 6 or more.
• A mixing order. Every recipe suggests laying down the base tones first and adding the last paint gradually, to fine-tune the shade against your target.
• Free mix. To experiment, pick two or three paints and move the sliders: Huelow shows the simulated result live, like a paint color mixer.

Step 3: buy fewer paints with Pool

Pool is Huelow's shopping list optimizer. It answers a question every painter asks: given all the colors I want, what is a short list of paints to buy?

1. Read your palettes. Each color of the palettes you include becomes a target. You can exclude a whole palette or a single color.
2. Test the mixes. For every target, Huelow searches the single paints, pairs and triples of your brand.
3. Optimize. It looks for paints that can serve several colors at once, and counts the paints you already own (your stock) first.
4. Choose. Pool offers three lists: Most faithful, the best match for each color with no paint sharing; Recommended, the shortest list that keeps the same number of near-perfect matches; Most economical, the shortest list overall, with looser matches.

The result is a shopping list and, for each color, the target, the color you obtain, the recipe and the palettes that need it. On the 19-color example shown on the home page, the most faithful list needs 43 paints and the recommended one needs 10. Your saving depends on how much your colors have in common.

Pool does not claim a proven minimum. Finding the absolute smallest set of paints is a hard combinatorial problem, so Huelow searches for a short list and shows how far each color is from its target. On the Free plan, Pool works on the demo palettes; Pro unlocks it for all your palettes.

How accurate are the recipes?

Why not average RGB values?

Screens mix light, paint mixes pigments. Averaging the RGB values of two colors treats paint like light and gives the wrong result. Take Huelow's own example, Chili Red and Flat White at 50/50: the RGB average is a pale, dull pink (#E38F92), while the physical mix is deeper and more vivid (#F16D9A). Getting paint right needs a model of how pigments absorb and scatter light.

The mixing model

Huelow uses Mixbox, a published pigment-mixing model (Šárka Sochorová and Ondřej Jamriška, ACM Transactions on Graphics, SIGGRAPH Asia 2021). It breaks each color down into the concentrations of four measured real pigments (phthalo, quinacridone, hansa yellow and titanium white) plus a small residual, and mixes them in proportion. The physics behind it is the Kubelka–Munk theory of how pigments absorb and scatter light.

How the search works

For each target, Huelow screens every paint, every pair and every triple of your brand's catalog, tries the allowed ratios for the most promising ones, and ranks the results by ΔE2000. To check the search, we compare it with a slow exhaustive test that tries every three-paint combination at every allowed ratio. On 57 test colors with the Angelus range, the fast search ended on average 0.014 ΔE from the best possible three-paint mix, and 0.31 ΔE in the worst case: far below a visible difference.

What ΔE2000 means

ΔE2000 (CIEDE2000) is the international standard formula for the difference between two colors as the human eye sees it. The higher the number, the more visible the gap.

What a simulation cannot know

• Catalog colors are on-screen approximations, not lab measurements.
• Real paint varies with pigments, batches, dilution, opacity, drying shift, surface and light.
• Transparent and effect paints (metallics, pearlescents, iridescents, fluorescents, inks and washes) cannot be predicted, so they are left out of mixes.
• For Liquitex artist acrylics, the model treats every paint as opaque. Their real transparency is not in the data, so expect a looser fit than with miniature paints.

So treat a recipe as a strong starting point: test it on a palette, add the last paint gradually and adjust.

Supported paint brands

Huelow works with one brand at a time, so every recipe uses paints from a single shelf. Switch brand from the header at any moment: your saved palettes keep working because they store colors, not paints.

Citadel paint mixing

Use Huelow as a Citadel paint mixing calculator: choose a target color and get recipes made only of Citadel Base and Layer paints, in parts. Citadel metallics can be matched as single shades but are left out of mixes.

Angelus paint mixing

Angelus Leather Paint is the reference for sneaker and leather customizing. Huelow gives you Angelus mixing recipes with ratios in parts, across 134 colors including the Collector Series. Metallics and pearlescents are matched but never mixed.

Scale 75 paint mixing

Recipes in drops for Scale 75 Artist and Fantasy & Games, made for dropper bottles. The six Scale 75 inks can be matched but not mixed.

Green Stuff World paint mixing

Recipes in drops for the Green Stuff World Acrylic Colors range, 104 paints in total.

Liquitex color mixing

Recipes for Liquitex Heavy Body acrylics, for artists who want to reproduce a color from a photo with the tubes they own. Iridescent and fluorescent paints are matched but not mixed, and the model treats every Liquitex paint as opaque.

More paint ranges are added over time.

Where the color data comes from

• Every paint in a catalog has an on-screen color value. None was measured with a spectrophotometer: they are approximations, and your screen adds its own.
• Each catalog carries a data quality label. Web: values recorded by hand from a public online color chart (Angelus). Community: values from an open community dataset (Citadel, Scale 75, Green Stuff World and Liquitex).
• The community data comes from Paintdex, published under the MIT licence. Copyright (c) 2026 Paintdex contributors.
• We review the data by hand. For example, six Citadel metallics were missing their tag upstream and six Liquitex pigments with the word shade in their name were wrongly excluded from mixes: both were corrected.
• Transparent and effect products (shades, washes, contrast paints, inks, metallics, colorshifts) are either not imported or kept only for matching, never for mixing.
• Huelow is independent and not affiliated with any paint brand. Brand and product names belong to their owners and are used only to identify real products.

Who Huelow is for

• Miniature and wargame painters. Match a color from reference art or a photo, mix it from your paints, then plan the palette of a whole army and get one shopping list.
• Scale modelers. Work out the mix for a livery or a camouflage shade before you open a bottle.
• Sneaker and leather customizers. Test a custom color with Angelus leather paints on screen first, then mix it with the ratios Huelow gives you.
• Acrylic artists. Use Huelow as an acrylic paint mixing calculator: find the tubes and proportions that reproduce a color from a photo.

Free and Pro

On the free plan, Create and color sampling from photos are unlimited, you can save up to 10 palettes, run up to 5 Paint Mix searches a day, track the stock of one brand and try Pool on the demo palettes. Pro costs €8 per month or €42 per year and removes all these limits.

Last updated: September 29, 2026.