Painter's Toolkit is built around a single idea: that matching a colour by eye is unreliable, but measuring the difference between two colours is not. Hold your phone's camera up to the colour you are trying to match, set it as your reference, then hold it up to the paint on your brush or the mix in your pot. The app tells you exactly which way you are wrong, whether your mix needs to be darker or lighter, more green or more red, more blue or more yellow, and by roughly how much. Adjust the mix, sample it again, and repeat until the two readings agree. It will not tell you the true colour of anything, no phone camera can, but it does not need to: it only has to tell you the difference, and that is a far easier problem to solve well.

JOURNEYMAN'S STUDIO
The paid tier adds three tools for painters who want to take this further.

Paint Mixer does the matching described above, in real time, with a running score and plain instructions on which direction to correct your mix.

Paint Recipe works the other way round. Give it a target colour and the palette of paints you already own, and it will work out the combination and ratio that gets you closest, along with a preview of the result.

Paint Lookup solves a narrower but common problem: finding the nearest equivalent to a paint in a different range, whether you are trying to replace a colour that has been discontinued or working out which of a rival manufacturer's paints is the closest match.

FIELD GUIDE
These four tools are free, with no restriction.

Colour Picker measures a colour, either live through the camera or from a photograph, and gives you the reading as Hex, RGB, HSV and CIE Lab.

Convert and Compare moves a colour between those formats, or sets two colours side by side and tells you how different they actually are.

Create Saved Colour lets you build a colour by eye with a picker, or enter exact values if you already know them, and keep it for later.

Saved Colours organises everything you keep into palettes of your own choosing: a decorating job, a model army, or whatever else you are working on.

PRICING
The Field Guide is free outright. Journeyman's Studio can be unlocked with a single one-off payment, or with a monthly subscription that may include a free trial; either way, the price is shown in the app before you commit to anything, and a subscription can be cancelled at any time through Google Play.

A NOTE ON ACCURACY
No phone camera measures colour with true precision, and this app does not claim otherwise. Lighting, the surface being measured and the camera itself all influence the reading, so treat the result as a considered guide rather than a certainty, and always test a sample before committing to a wall or a model. Paint and brand names mentioned in the app belong to their respective owners; Painter's Toolkit is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of them.

There are no accounts, no advertisements and no tracking in this app.

If there is a paint range you would like added, or you simply want to get in touch, the Info screen in the app will point you the right way, or you can write to droidnodeltd@gmail.com.