Color Palette Fixer

Why palettes clash: brightness, vividness, hue, temperature

Most palettes that "feel off" are not wrong in an interesting way. They fail on one of four plain axes, and the color palette fixer checks all four before it touches anything. Brightness: two colors that sit next to each other and are almost — but not quite — equally light. The eye reads the difference as an error rather than a decision; a navy and a charcoal a few steps apart look like the same color printed on a bad day. Vividness: one color is a dusty, muted tone and its neighbor is neon. Each can be fine alone; together, the loud one makes the quiet one look dirty and the quiet one makes the loud one look cheap. Hue: colors that are almost related — a blue ten degrees away from the brand blue — create the near miss, which is worse than a clean contrast: close enough to look intended, far enough to look inconsistent. Temperature: a warm terracotta beside a cool blue-gray with nothing to bridge them splits a palette into two camps. Ask "why do my colors clash?" and the answer is almost always one of these four, often two of them at once.

Keep what can't change — printed, registered, already on the wall

This is the part a palette generator cannot do. In real projects some colors are not up for debate: the brand blue is registered and printed on ten thousand tote bags; the sofa was delivered last month; the product's primary is baked into the logo file. A fix that touches those is not a fix. So every color chip has a Keep toggle. A kept color stays exactly as it is — the fixer treats it as a wall the others must arrange themselves around, never as a suggestion. If you keep nothing, the most vivid color becomes the base and the result says so, because someone has to lead. Two kept colors are fine as well; the free colors then have to satisfy both, which is precisely what "make colors match" means when the two anchors were chosen years apart by different people.

Read the diagnosis before you touch anything

Automatic fixes are easy to distrust, so this tool is diagnosis first. Press "Fix colors" and, before any new palette, you get "What was wrong": at most three plain lines, each naming the colors involved with a chip: "steelblue and crimson are almost the same brightness — side by side they read as a mistake", "crimson is far more vivid than the rest", "warm and cool colors are mixed". No numbers on the default path; if you want them, "Show numbers" in More options adds the ΔE, lightness, vividness and hue to each chip of the After strip. After the fix each line is marked resolved or still showing, and the note under them says why a line remains — a kept color, or a switch that is off. The point is that you can disagree. If the diagnosis says the accent is too vivid and you know the accent is the whole idea, keep it and let the others move instead. The diagnosis is the same list that drives the repair, so what you read is what gets fixed — nothing happens behind the curtain.

How far did each color move? Before and after

Every result shows a Before | After control on the stage (the B key toggles it) and one strip of chips. Each chip either says "kept" or describes its move in words: "moved a little: warmer, into the navy family — #7a93bc". The words are computed, not decorative: direction (warmer or cooler), lightness, vividness (more vivid or calmer) and a size from "a touch" to "a lot" — or simply "unchanged" when nothing had to move. Behind them, the solver moves every free color by the smallest perceptual distance that clears the diagnosis — it works in OKLCH and measures with ΔE2000, the same number the compare tool shows — and each strength has a budget: Gentle allows a small step you see only side by side, Balanced a change you notice on a second look, Bold one you notice immediately. Switching strength re-runs instantly. Every free chip on the After strip has its own color input for a manual nudge, Undo is one click, and nothing is applied until you press "Use this palette". If a move would push a saturated color outside what screens can show, the chip says it was pulled back into gamut.

Walkthroughs: brand refresh, inherited template, the sofa that stays

Brand refresh. The example palette is this case: navy and a warm red are the brand, a dusty blue and an off-white were added later for the website. Keep the navy and the red and press Fix. The diagnosis flags the dusty blue twice — it is almost the same brightness as the red, and its hue is a near miss of the navy — and it flags the red as far more vivid than the rest, which you can ignore because the red is kept — the result says so under the lines. Balanced lifts the dusty blue slightly and snaps it into the navy's family so it reads as a deliberate tint of the brand blue. The off-white is a neutral and stays where it is. The brand colors have not changed by a single digit.

Inherited template. A slide deck, a theme file, a logo from a previous agency: four colors that never matched. Keep nothing — there is no anchor to defend — and let the most vivid color lead. To fix a color palette like this the tool usually has to do two things: pull the vividness of the outliers toward the base, and spread the brightness so colors that touch are clearly distinct. If Balanced is not enough, Bold is still a repair, not a replacement: colors keep their identity, they just stop arguing.

The sofa that stays. The sofa and the floor exist; the wall and the curtains are open. Enter all four, keep the sofa and the floor, and switch the stage to Nested so the small patch sits inside the large field the way it will in the room. The nested check is stricter than side by side: an accent inside a large field of similar brightness simply disappears, and the fixer lifts or drops the free color until it does not. Then "Test on a wall" in More options sends the result to the color tester's wall scene to see it under morning and evening light.

Nothing is uploaded

The fixer runs entirely in your browser: the colors you paste, the canvases you save and the share links you create never touch a server. Saved canvases live in this browser's storage next to My colors, and the dock can export all of it as one JSON file — and import it on another machine. To fix clashing colors is one job; to align a palette to a chosen scheme — same family, neighbors, opposite, triad, split — is the other, and the palette harmonizer does that with the same engine and the scheme choice up front.