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Comment by eugene-khyst | Hacker News Reader

The web app heavily utilizes the sRGB color space for calculations, which has a limited color gamut. As a result, some colors, especially those outside the sRGB color gamut, may not be accurately represented. But this is also true for taking photo of your painting and posting it to the social networks. If you can't accept some minimal inaccuracy of a few colors of your painting, you should not post it online and only exhibited it in galleries.

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There are a minimum of two colors at play in a photograph: the color of the object, and the color of the light. Picking a color from a photograph is always an average of these two colors and any other interacting factors. When you place a color on a canvas, how it looks depends on the surrounding colors (look up simultaneous contrast for an interesting example).

This is not about how a painting looks online, this is about how the painting itself comes out.

Unfortunately, even well-known college art programs are not always rigorous in teaching theory. Art education is also a far different subject than being an artist. Bad habits are easy to create, and this app encourages shortcuts that create bad habits.

I guess the difference here is that I see this as a set of potentially useful tools for someone who already knows what they're doing, and not educational tools for beginners. It certainly doesn't seem to be advertised as such.

"learn how to simplify and abstract your paintings"

"to learn how to create contrast and depth in your paintings"

The creator talks about learning core art skills that a working artist should already have.

Oh. You read closer than I did. Fair enough. You're right.

You probably know this, but it gets even worse. Paint can be applied in many translucent layers, and the reflectance of paint materials can differ a lot. The color therefore also changes depending on how you look at the painting and under what lighting conditions.

The same goes for objects, and photos typically capture only a limited subset of this.

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