What's New

Nothing big in the past little while. Mostly dependency and security updates.

The visualiser now carries a ripple animation when a new colour is applied, so that’s nice.

Swapped from Haiku 4.5 to version 5.5 which brings a boost in performance for you (roughly 1.4 seconds quicker) and reduced costs for me. Everybody wins.

Dulux Heritage has been added with 112 paint colours.

The visualiser was a rudimentary, but effective, way of getting an idea of how a colour might look on a wall. With the latest update, the 3D render is much more photorealistic.

Before I was asking you to wait around twenty seconds to generate a palette, which isn't ideal.

After a lot of benchmarking, and response quality testing, the models in use have been tweaked and swapped around to deliver something in around six seconds now.

Also, if you don't have an account and generated one, it'll be waiting for you on the homepage so you don't lose track of it.

Sometimes you can search for a colour with a filter applied like family colour, or brand. The colour might not surface with those filters, so instead we let you know what happened, and surface potential colours you might have wanted.

Initially we had closest matches only show top equivalents across all brands, but now you can compare between individual brands to see more potential suggestions.

Also improved palette generation - much better output and steps to capture when you mention specific colours or brands.

Every paint page now has a "See it on your wall" button. Tap it, point your phone at a wall, and the wall changes to that colour while you watch. The light, the shadows and the picture hooks all stay as they are; only the colour changes. Nothing is uploaded, and there is nothing to install.

What you can do

• Flick through colours on the wall. A strip along the bottom holds the paint's lighter and darker versions, its accents, and the same colour in other brands. One tap swaps it.
• Hold the frame. Freeze the wall to try morning, midday and an evening lamp on it, or tap to paint a second wall.
• Start from a colour you have. Point the camera at a cushion, a tile or a chip and we find the closest real paints in every brand, then put the nearest one on your wall.
• Correct your camera. Phones read colour through their own white balance and the room's light. Hold up any paint chip you already own, read it once, and every reading after that is corrected against it.

What it is not

A phone camera and a phone screen both shift colour, and a finish changes how a paint reads. Use this to get five sample pots down to one, not to skip the pot. The wall averages out to the paint's real colour, and everything else you see is your room's own light.

Every paint page lists the closest colour from each other brand, labelled excellent match, good match or close alternative. Now you can check that for yourself. Turn on Compare against this colour above the matches and each one is butted straight up against the paint you're looking at, with no line between them. An excellent match has no join to find; a close alternative shows a step. Read across until you reach the last one you can't see.

A steadier feel throughout

Matches, palettes and suggested colours now resolve into place instead of appearing all at once, and the small moments like copying a hex value, shortlisting a colour, switching between views now respond the way you'd expect. If your system is set to reduced motion, none of it moves.

A new blog was added to post about trending colours of the week, and other bigger updates that fall outside the idea of general changes and fixes. Based on how many visitors it gets, there might be an option to subscribe by email later. Rather than spending time building that for no one to use it I've added an option to subscribe via RSS instead.

The navigation was getting a bit cluttered, so there's a new dropdown for tools.

Favourite a colour before you have an account

You no longer need to sign up to start collecting. Tap the heart on any colour and it joins your shortlist, which you can compare side by side like always. Create an account whenever you're ready and every colour comes with you.

Shortlists are kept on the device you're using, so they won't follow you to your phone until there's an account behind them.

The explorer keeps going

Browsing colours no longer means clicking through pages. Colours now load as you scroll, and after a couple of pages a button hands the pace back to you, so the bottom of the page is still somewhere you can reach.

On a phone, the filters follow you down the page. A button at the bottom of the screen opens search, brands and colour families wherever you've scrolled to.

See where a colour sits in its family

Every colour page now ends with the run of chips either side of it on its family's card, and tells you where it falls, e.g "the 412th of 887 greens". Some of its neighbours look quite different, which shows you the range a colour lives in, and gives you somewhere to go next.

Colours open faster

Paint pages are now fetched the moment you hover or press a swatch.

When you have some favourites as a shortlist, view them in the dashboard and see how they compare with each other.

Describe the room on the home page, or start from paints you already like, and get a palette of real paints with no account. It gets its own page you can share, and creating a free account keeps it.

• Get a better sense of how a paint might look in a room
• Based on a 3D render with customisable lighting conditions and trim colour
• Preview on any paint detail page, and customise on the dedicated page
• Share link so you can share with others

• Palette creation has been improved by letting you pick between favourites, browsing the catalogue, or selecting your own colour to find the closest matches

Miscellaneous

• Domain management moved to Cloudflare for better analysis of traffic and usage

• Added Alchemist
• Better suggestions for what works well with a paint such as trims, accents, neutrals, tints and shades...

If you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see next, please get in touch.

• The original site was never meant to do so much, so it has been completely rebuilt to ease future development and support more features.
• New architecture and hosting for better performance and reliability.
• New design for a more modern and user-friendly experience.