Release notes
A history of what changed and why, from the very first build.
v2.0: Studies
The app now remembers your work. Import a photo, simplify it, come back tomorrow and pick up where you left off.
- Persistent studies that save your reference photo, cluster settings, and palette snapshot
- Home screen following the document-browser pattern with a launch card and browsable study grid
- Session resume without re-clustering: the full cluster map, centroids, and tonal analysis restore instantly from disk
- Auto-save on re-cluster with 500ms debounce
- Auto-naming from Vision image classification
- Palette snapshot frozen at study creation, with mismatch detection if the active palette changes
- HEIC image storage (~200KB per study) and LZFSE-compressed cluster maps (~30–60KB)
- Soft-delete with confirmation
- Liquid Glass browser sheet on iOS 26
- Palette management accessible from both the home screen and within a study
v1.5: Foreground First
Smarter clustering that understands what the painter cares about.
- Two-pass foreground-aware clustering using Vision subject segmentation
- Foreground subjects receive more colour clusters than backgrounds (70/30 budget split)
- Display image capped at 3000px with pre-Vision downsampling for memory safety
- Tonal analysis now uses raw L* values (tone mapping disabled) for accurate value structure
v1.4: Your Palette, Your Way
Expanded paint support and better palette management.
- Palette presets browser with custom palette builder
- Holbein Artists' Watercolours 24-paint preset palette
- 413 paints from three major brands (Winsor & Newton, Schmincke Horadam, Holbein) via real spectral data
- Paint search with smart apostrophe matching
- Paint count badge on the palette toolbar button
v1.3: Paint and Paper
A visual overhaul that made the app feel like a painting tool, not a tech demo.
- Paper-native UI redesign with floating controls and concentric device-radius panels
- Procedural watercolour swatch textures via Metal shader (granulation, paper grain, edge softening)
- Paint vs reference visual language distinguishing sampled colours from mixed predictions
- Liquid Glass toolbar styling for iOS 26
- Cluster isolation mode to highlight a single colour region against dimmed surroundings
- Colour detail sheet redesign with recipe carousel and improved dilution labels
- Adaptive system colours replacing hardcoded values
v1.2: Hands On
New ways to explore and understand the reference photo.
- Pinch-to-zoom and tap-to-inspect on the photo view
- Grid overlay (2–6 divisions) with tap-to-zoom quadrant navigation and centre-origin support
- Analysis loupe for drag-to-explore colour sampling with real-time Munsell display
- Tonal value study mode with Notan, 3-Value, 5-Value, and 7-Value band views
- Value band export with shareable images, attribution text, and embedded IPTC metadata
v1.1: Seeing Clearly
Fixes and refinements that made the core workflow reliable.
- Fixed upside-down photo imports (EXIF orientation handling)
- Improved recipe search granularity for light and dark tones
- Palettes now preserved when spectral data is refreshed
- Multi-paint mixes surfaced properly via penalty-based ranking
- Watercolour tone mapping for more realistic recipe matching
v1.0: Foundation
The first working build. Import a photo, simplify it into colour regions, and get mixing recipes from a personal palette.
- Photo simplification with k-means clustering in CIE L*a*b* colour space (5–20 regions)
- Kubelka-Munk mixing engine for physically accurate subtractive colour prediction
- Recipe search across 1-, 2-, and 3-paint combinations with CIEDE2000 colour matching
- Munsell colour notation with interpolated lookup from the RIT renotation dataset
- Palette setup with bundled spectral data for Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolours
- Dilution modelling using K/S blending between pigment and paper substrate