Colour mixing for artists
Iris
Touch any colour in a photograph.
Iris tells you exactly what to mix.
Winsor & Newton · Gamblin · Michael Harding
Coming soon
App Store
Coming soon
Google Play
iPhone and iPad · requires iOS 16.4 or later
Touch any colour
Get the recipe
Check your values
Grid up your reference
Build your palette
One studio tool, instead of five
Iris was built by a working painter who was tired of juggling separate apps for cropping, gridding, checking values and guessing at colour. It does all four, and then does the thing none of them could: tell you what to actually mix.
Mixing recipes, not colour names
Sample any colour in a photograph and Iris works out which tubes to combine, and in what proportions — expressed as simple parts you can scoop onto a palette.
Built on pigment physics
Paint does not mix like light. Iris models subtractive pigment mixing using Kubelka–Munk theory and scores every match in CIEDE2000, the current standard for how different two colours actually look.
Your palette, your brands
Winsor & Newton, Gamblin and Michael Harding oil ranges are built in. Choose the tubes you actually own and every recipe is mixed from those — or let Iris suggest the one tube that would get you closer.
Value checking that respects your eye
See any photograph as true perceptual value — a two-value notan through to the full ten-step scale — cut in equal steps of CIE lightness rather than in raw screen values.
Prepare your reference
Crop to your canvas proportions, grid up for transfer, zoom into detail, and save the prepared image straight to your photo library.
Everything stays on your device
No account, no upload, no analytics, no tracking. Your photographs never leave your phone.
An honest note
No screen can promise what paint will do. Camera processing, image lighting and display colour all shift what you see, and every recipe is a strong starting point rather than a guarantee. The final judge is the same as it has always been — your eye.
Free, and Iris Pro
Iris is free to use. Mixing is unlimited, and free palettes mix from a core set of five colours — a real, capable limited palette.
Iris Pro unlocks the palette builder: mix from the full range of every brand built into the app, choose the exact tubes you own, and get suggestions for the one colour that would bring a match closer. It is an auto-renewing subscription, offered monthly or annually.
Prices are shown in the app and on the App Store in your local currency. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. A subscription renews automatically unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period, and you can manage or cancel it at any time in your device Settings. See the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.