Lightfast

Paint recipes for any color.

Point it at a photo, a palette file or the color wheel, and Lightfast tells you which real paints to mix, and how much of each.

Try it in your browser iPhone app · coming soon
The Lightfast color wheel: every cell is a real, measured watercolor paint, with two paints selected.
A photo of a mountain river turned into numbered areas, each one a paint color.
The recipe list: each number with the paints to mix, in plain words.

The wheel · a picture, numbered · its recipes

Real paints, not color maths.

Every cell on the wheel is a watercolor paint someone actually measured. Recipes are checked against the color you asked for, and Lightfast tells you when a match is only close.

Cobalt blue + a good deal of Indian red, with a little whiteThe distant mountain
Perylene green + a good deal of green goldSunlit young firs
Cobalt blue, with a little whiteThe sky

What it does

One recipe engine, four ways in.

A wheel of real paints

Build palettes with schemes, presets and the palettes of painters like Zorn and Monet, then see exactly which paints they are.

From a picture

Take a photo or choose one. Lightfast finds its colors and gives a recipe for each, straight from the tube or mixed.

From a palette file

Bring palettes from Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate or GIMP and get every color back as a paint recipe.

Four pictures to paint from

Your original, clean line art, a numbered paint-by-numbers map and a printable recipe sheet.

Your own paintbox

Optional: mark the paints you own, and recipes come from your box wherever they can.

Private by design

No account, no tracking. Everything happens on your device and it works offline.

Built on measured paint

The wheel is built on the watercolor measurements of Bruce MacEvoy, whose handprint.com guide has been the painter's reference on pigments for decades.

Six historic pigments (smalt, verdigris, orpiment, realgar, red lead and green earth) are computed from open research data, all under CC BY 4.0: the Granada historical-manuscripts pigments (Reichert, López-Baldomero, Valero, Cardell et al., 2025), the Kremer color-chart hyperspectral library (Hilda Deborah, NTNU, 2022) and the Dunhuang mineral pigments set (Liu Zhen et al., 2022).

Further pigment measurements come from artistpigments.org, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence, and are credited paint by paint inside the app.

Brand availability covers Daniel Smith, Holbein, M. Graham, Schmincke, Sennelier and Winsor & Newton.