Artists like Allan Kaprow and Frieder Nake helped pioneer the emerging field of digital art in the 1960s. Since then, technology has allowed people to explore their creative potential in new ways. Even with recent advancements, the medium still leaves some room for improvement: The colors in many painting software programs, like Adobe Photoshop and Procreate, appear duller than real pigments. That’s why the creators of a new tool called Mixbox are changing the game.
Why do digital paints tend to look dull compared to the real thing? A study {PDF} from the Czech Technical University in Prague explains that most graphic design software uses RGB representation. This color model mimics the mixing of colored lights rather than physical pigments, making combined shades appear muddled and less vibrant.
Actual paint behaves differently. If you were to mix blue and yellow pigments, the particles in the paints would absorb and scatter light, reflecting green wavelengths. Paint colors also gain saturation when combined with white, whereas RBG colors lose it.
Paul Kubelka and Franz Munk accurately recreated these visuals and were the first to predict the behavior of paint mixtures with their research published in 1931. However, their theory of light absorption and scattering via layering paint never gained widespread attention, mainly because it’s challenging for software developers to implement it.
Mixbox’s approach to paint combines the Kubelka–Munk model of pigment mixing with an RGB interface. Users select RGB colors to mix, while internally, the software treats them like physical pigments, resulting in saturated gradients, transitioning hues, and natural secondary colors during blending. You can copy the necessary code from Mixbox’s webpage in your language of choice (which includes Python, Javascript, and more). If you aren’t sure where to start, the site also provides coding examples and a demo painter to play around with.
Remember, Mixbox isn’t a plugin you can install into a pre-existing design software like Photoshop. It requires some coding knowledge to use. If you lack that, your other option is to contact the developers of your favorite painting program and ask them to adopt the tool.
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