Feature Request: Mixbox True Pigment Mixing

@bobzilla63 

Is this about pigment mixing representation, or overall color reproduction?

If the latter, I suspect "Rebelle", whatever that is, doesn't fully support color management. Or you have a defective monitor profile. Either way, you should start a new thread.

If this is about how to represent mixing pigments, my point above was that there is no absolute reference to this. Different pigments of the same hue behave differently. One blue pigment does not mix the same way as another blue pigment. If you want to attract new customers you can obviously present a very vivid representation, but that doesn't mean it's realistic.

I'cve noticed the colors in Rebelle, with or without pigment mixing enabled, seem brighter than other apps, especially Photoshop. And, I'm pretty sure I'm iusing the same color space and profile.

Bob

@Trevor.Dennis 

Actually that graphic isn't necessarily very realistic.

I have, as some of you may know, a five year art academy education in my history. It's a long time ago, but I do know pigments and how they behave.

You might get that bright green on the left from certain synthetic phtalocyanine blue pigments on the cyan-blue side - and a much purer lemon yellow. But most traditional blue pigments, like cobolt, ultramarine, cerulean and prussian blue, would give the muddy colors in the middle. That's realistic. Most real world pigment mixing (oil or acrylic) is pretty disapponting.

Well, after seeing all the AI stuff Adobe is adding, and the Mixer Brush and brush engine in general hasn't been touched in many years, I think we can assume they have no plans of adding real pigment mixing. They just don;t seem interested in enhancing Photoshop's painting ability. Those who have painted in it for years are perhaps not interested and deal with workarounds, like just picking colors they want rather than mix them.

JUst my 2cents...

Bob

Just to add that I love this grap[hic and what it tells us, and that I fully support Photoshop having a function to mix colours the same as they do in real life.

Putting my voice in this thread. Please, whoever developer sees this, consider adding Mixbox! Make artists happy and fruitful. You were able to provide AI system - can implement this as well

The Mixer Brush doesn't behave like real pigments supposed to in many cases.
For example, simply mixing most obvious colors, like Hansa yellow and Ultramarine blue gives bronse *.

Photoshop RGB has known issues handling darker shades (as in Color Replacement tool).

But even using lighter shades, when mixing, the saturation is reduced - again not how natural pigments are supposed to work.

Here resulting in dull greens and dirty violets as illustrated by Kyle Webster in Photoshop for Artists: Working with Color in Photoshop with Kyle T. Webster .

The issue is most elloquently descirbed by Kyle in Photoshop Brush Top Tips and Tricks.

Problem we're working an RGB. RGB has one fatal flaw, and that is greens. When you mix a blue and a yellow in RGB you usually get kind of a grey, okay. And I'll show you the workaround ...

Here's my blue here's my yellow and there's my greeeen ?! -- right, terrible!

RGB math just doesn't work in the green part of the spectrul and with darker shades. To work properly, mixing must happen in a different color space, where Hue, Value and Saturation are distributed more evenly.

That is the purpose of this feature request: so we don't have to interrupt the natural mixing with workarounds, which involves reaching for the color picker and pushing the sliders:

... What you do is sample your yellow more towards the green, okay. Make that your starting point. Now take your blue, lightly mix them. Lightly. And whatever color you get, pull it over here [in the Color Picker] and just go from left to right just pull it over [towards more saturation] okay and that becomes the color you want.

How is that natural color mixing?

So the problem is I'm mixing a yellow with a blue that's not very good for mixing greens, because my blue is way towards my reds.

No, that's not a problem to have a blue with some reds, it's called Ultramarine. And in real world, it mixes perfectly with yellow to give warm greens, as opposed to bronze.

But even when choosing more Cerulean (cooler) blue, the mixed "green" is too dirty and requires moving the Color Picker slider again towards the more saturated natural green.

Why do we have to move the sliders all the time like an abacus, when we have algorithms for that in 2024?

* Hansa yellow and Ultramarine blue using Mixer Brush gives dirty bronse or even dirty purple.

Even using RGB 16 or Lab 16 color profiles - same issue.

I have BEGGED the developers of Art Studio Pro to make a few adjustments to make it easier to use on desktop, but I rarely get an answer. It's so close to being pretty much a perfect painitng software. It handles Photoshop brushes nearly flawlessly. The real pigment and wet brush technology are great.

Adobe should at least be able to add the real pigment ability. At the very least, update the Mixer Brush tech. All it really does, at best is blur or smear pixels. Nothing really "mixes".

I've gone from using Photoshop as a retouching app for many years to a painting app, so the shortcomings are glaring now.

Bob

I'm just posting to say at least for me there is still merit and personal interest in seeing this come to photoshop. When it comes to my primary workflows in making concept art, photoshop is unmatched, but unfortunately, it's' color mixing and brush engine, in general, is lacking even in comparison to clearly photoshop inspired tools like artstudio pro. I think having mixbox as an option would make photoshop a much more well rounded software for painters like myself, where I find myself sacrificing the rich colors I could be getting in software that has implemented mixbox for the myriad of addons I have that make working in photoshop so much faster than another software.

@Anna Katrin Caiado 

I've merged your post with this thread.

Jane