Soft Pastel Color Studio

Soft Pastel Color Studio brings together the color ranges of 23 of the best-known soft pastel brands — 7,826 colors in all — and allows you to compare them with one another. Show the app a color, and it names the pastel sticks that come closest, each with its maker's own name and number. Not a shade on a screen: a stick you can find in your own box or buy.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Find which pastels match a color in a photograph or a painting • Choose a color on the wheel and see which brands make something like it • Find alternatives for a particular stick in other brands — when it has run out, or when the brand is hard to buy where you live • Build a palette for a whole image and see the picture redrawn in those sticks • Enter the pastels you own and work only with your own collection • Explore color harmonies built from real pastels

THE TOOLS

Image — choose a photograph, a painting or a drawing, crop it, and tap any part of it. The app reads a small patch of color rather than a single pixel, then names the closest sticks in the brands you select. Color — choose a color on the wheel and adjust its hue, saturation and value. The color travels with you between the tools. Alternative — choose a brand and one of its colors, then see what other brands offer in its place. Where a range holds nothing close enough, the app says so instead of offering a poor match. Harmony — choose a color and a scheme: complementary, split complementary, analogous, triad, tetrad or square. Every point of the scheme is matched to real sticks in the range you choose, or in your own collection.

YOUR OWN PASTELS

Enter the sticks you own, brand by brand, and the whole app uses them. Any result you already have is marked "In your box", so you can see at once what you need not buy.

RESULTS YOU CAN KEEP

Recent colors keep your last eight selections at hand. Results can be printed, saved as a PDF or shared — a clean page with every stick, its number and how close it is. Projects can be saved to the Library with your image, your color and the pastels the app found.

HOW THE MATCHING WORKS

Colors are compared using CIEDE2000, an international standard for measuring color difference as the eye judges it. Results are rated Almost Identical, Very Close or Close; anything further apart is not offered as a match at all. The color data is compiled from manufacturers' published charts and from Paul Centore's survey of artists' pastels, in which real sticks were measured with a spectrophotometer. No two brands make exactly the same complex color, so a close match is a close match, not an identical one — which is exactly why it is worth seeing how the ranges compare.

BRANDS INCLUDED

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