Palette now has four ways to play

Palette started simple: one colour per day, six sliders, one shot. Mix RGB and CMY until you get as close as you can, then submit. That's still here — and it's still the daily challenge everyone plays together.

But we just added 240 levels across four completely different mechanics. Here's what's new.

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Classic (levels 1–60)

The daily format, but on your own schedule. Sixty puzzles sorted by difficulty — easy warm-up colours at the start, tricky desaturated mids and muddy near-neutrals toward the end. Same RGB and CMY sliders you already know.

Good for: building intuition, practising without the daily pressure.

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Memory (levels 61–120)

The target colour appears for five seconds. Then it blurs out and locks behind a padlock. You mix from memory.

This sounds brutal, and at first it is. But you quickly learn to feel a colour rather than analyse it. Is it warm or cool? Dark or light? More saturated than I thought? Your first instinct is usually closer than your overthought answer.

Scoring is more forgiving here — the bands are wider because perfect recall isn't really the point. The point is training your colour memory.

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Restricted (levels 121–180)

The RGB and CMY sliders are gone. You get HSL instead: Hue (0–360°), Saturation, Lightness.

HSL forces a completely different way of thinking. In RGB you ask "how much red, how much blue?" In HSL you ask "what colour family is this, how vivid is it, how light is it?" Artists tend to find this more natural. People used to code tend to find it harder. Either way, it's a genuinely different challenge.

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Studio (levels 181–240)

This one is unlike anything else in Palette.

Four sliders: Exposure, Temperature, Tint, Saturation. If you've used Lightroom, Capture One, or any photo editing app, you've seen these. They work in LAB colour space — the same perceptual space that Delta-E scoring uses — so equal slider movements produce equal perceived changes. That's not how RGB works.

Temperature shifts the colour warm or cool (the b axis in LAB). Tint shifts it green or magenta (the a axis). Exposure controls brightness. Saturation controls how vivid the result is.

The mental model is completely different from both RGB and HSL. You stop thinking about colour values and start thinking about corrections. Too warm — pull Temperature left. Too grey — push Saturation up. It takes a few levels to click, and then it feels obvious.

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How scoring works

All four modes score by Delta-E — a perceptual distance measure. A Delta-E of 1 is a difference most people can barely detect. Below 3 is excellent. The bands differ per mode:

Classic and Restricted use the same tight bands as the daily game. Memory and Studio have wider bands — not because we're being generous, but because the mechanics make perfect scores genuinely harder to achieve.

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Play

Palette is free, no account needed, and works in your browser: palette.stoop.games

The daily puzzle resets every midnight. Levels are there whenever you want them.