Background
As a hobby painter with colour vision issues, my approach to selecting the appropriate paint for the outcome that I want is always
going to be special.
Also, there are SOOOOOOO many different paint colours with weird "proprietary" names out there that don't necessarily mean anything to me.
I find a colour recipe on-line that gives you the name of the colour (and more often than not the manufacturer ... and sometimes the paint
range name too) but I don't have that colour in my paint collection ... what can I use instead, that's a close match for what I'm painting?
I created the Paint Manager windows application as a way of managing my paint collection. This tool allows me to list all of the paint colours
from as many of the hobby paint manufacturers that I have been able to download and "grab" the hex colour (and integer RGB) values for (the quality
of the grabbed hex/RGB values is as good as I could get using MS-Paint and then doing a HEX to DEC conversion in MS-EXCEL).
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Main Interface
The main interface is a listing of all of the paints in my hobby paint database by manufacturer, paint range and paint name. I also included a
quick paint swatch in the last column to see what the colour looks like.
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When you select a row, the tool shows you a larger version of the paint swatch, the RGB values and a button to find other paint colours that are
similar.
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Find Nearest Colour
When you click the "Find Colour" button, the application goes through all of the colours in the database to find colours where the RGB values are similar
(my method is proprietary) and displays all of those near colours in a dialogue box with the colours displayed in another table.
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Image Analyser
This is a tool that allows you to pick any pixel in an image and the application will extract the RGB colour values from the pixel that you
clicked on.
Once again, the tool shows the selected colour in the right-hand panel along with the RGB values. This tool ALSO provides a "Find Colour" button.
Here, I've clicked on the sky in the top(ish) left(ish) of the image.
Note of warning not all images are equal. Many lower resolution images have anti-aliased colours (using stippled colours to seem to be one
solid colour). The colour swatch to the right will show you a full resolution colour of the pixel selected.
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Clicking the "Find Nearest" button will display the colours in the database that are close to the selected colour. Helpfully, this shows you the
name of the colour selected according to the weird hobby paint colour names.
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Database Management
Ewww! I know, right? The tool provides an easy interface to allow you to add, update, and delete records from the database.
There are also tools provided to import and export your data. So you can share your collection information with your friends or the community!
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Paint Recipes
The application will provide you with a means of adding collections of paints into recipes so that you can record the different colours,
tones, styles of paint and paint application to make up your painting special effects (such as Non-Metalic Metal NMM, specular highlights) and
paint recipes for building a repeatable army/unit colour palette.
This is still a work in progress, but I hope to replace this text ... right here ... with an image of the tool soon.
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So what?
If you are interested in this software and would like to participate in an early trial, please contact me on paintman@briano.com.au.
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